Crypt Of Cthulhu #68 (1989.Cryptic)[CosmicJukebox]

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TIIE II. P. LOVECRAFT CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE

The John Hay Library. Brown University
Providence. Rhode Island

11=19 August 1990

To mark H. P. Lovecraft's centennial on 20 August 1990,
the John Hay Library proudly announces a series of events,
presented free of charge, and aimed at as wide an audience as
possible, in honor of the great Providence, Rhode Island, author
of horror and fantasy.

While still in the early planning stages, the program already
features a series of panels boasting premier Lovecraft experts
from around the world, a major exhibition of Lovecraft manu-
scripts, books, and associated items, an art exhibit by top art-
ists featuring works influenced by Lovecraft. as well as walking
tours hosted by Henry L. P. Beckwith, author of Lovecraft's
Providence (Donald M. Grant, 1986).

The John Hay Library is the most appropriate sponsor of
these centennial events, as it holds the largest collection in the
world of Lovecraft's manuscripts and printed works.

Inexpensive dormitory rooms on the beautiful Brown Univer-
sity campus will be available to those attending for a nominal fee
of approximately $25-30.

In order to better prepare the program, estimate atten-
dance, and also create a mailing list for updates, we'd like to
hear from all interested in attending. Further information about
registration and room reservations will be mailed in the coming
months.

Please send all inguiries care of Necronomicon Press, 101
Lockwood Street. West Warwick, Rhode Island 02893, USA.

CRYPT OF

CTHULHU

A Pulp Thriller and Theological Journal
Volume 9, Number 1 Hallowmas 1989

CONTENTS

Editorial Shards 2

The Prodigy of Dreams 3

By Thomas Ligotti

Allan and Adelaide— An Arabesque 10

By Thomas Ligotti

Ghost Stories for the Dead 18

By Thomas Ligotti

Studies in Horror 21

By Thomas Ligotti

Order of Illusion 33

By Thomas Ligotti

Charnelhouse of the Moon 35

By Thomas Ligotti

Ten Steps to Thin Mountain 37

By Thomas Ligotti

Selections of Lovecraft 38

By Thomas Ligotti

The Consolations of Horror 42

By Thomas Ligotti

R'lyeh Review 50

Mail-Call of Cthulhu 53

1

2 / Crypt of Cthulhu

Debatable and Disturbing:

EDITORIAL SHARDS

In Lin Carter's last letter to this
magazine, he waxed enthusiastic
about Thomas Ligotti's "Vastarien"
and "The Mystics of Muelenherg."
Lin in his capacities as anthologist
and editor of the famous Adult Fan-
tasy Series had a sharp eye for new
talent, and one senses in Lin's
praises that he saw in Ligotti a
unique talent he rather wished he
could have claimed the credit for
discovering. What he said was,
"This Ligotti chap astonishes me.
Seems like he came out of nowhere
just recently and is already an ac-
complished master, as far as I'm
concerned. His subtlety of effect,
control of mood and atmosphere, and
sheer power of eerie suqge stiveness
would have delighted Lovecraft him-
self, who admired that sort of thing
but couldn't do it any more than
can. Suggest you spin off another
Crypti c sibling: Ligotti Tale s, and

put together everything he's pub-
lished so far. He is a marvel!"

Not a bad idea. Uncle Lin, not a
bad idea! Thus this 68th issue of
Crypt of Cth u lhu collects various
stray Ligotti tales not collected in
the scarce Silver Scarab Press
Songs of a Dead D reame r, an ex
panded edition of which is to ap
pear from The Weird T ales Library .

Ligotti is all that Lin said above.
Lin, by the way, saw only the
Ligotti stories published in Crypt ,
and perhaps a couple of others. He
received Songs of a Dead Dreamer
in the hospital only days before he

died and never had a chance to
read it. But really any Ligotti tale
is a microcosm of his whole ouvre .

Tom Ligotti combines the traits
of unbounded macabre imagination
with fluence and prolificity. Every-
where one turns, at least in the
small press, one sees his work.
Despite occasional forays into the
mass-market universe (inclusions in
Salmonson [ed.| H eroic Visions II
and Winter led.) Prime Evil ), Li-
gotti is content to write for the
small circle of lovers of the classical
horror tradition. He will not accom-
modate himself to the style or sub-
jects of modern "Dark Fantasy,"
nor will he compromise his artistry
by working in novel length, too
clumsy and blunt an instrument
with which to work his intricate
sorceries. And in this uncompro-
mising attitude, this "weird for
weird's sake" aesthetic integrity,
Ligotti is at least as truly Love
craftian as he is in mood and style.

Most of the "Studies in Horror"
are new to this collection, but all
the rest of the items assembled here
are taken from various now-unob
tainable small press magazines. (If
you want to know which ones, we
suggest you consult the bibliogra-
phy provided in the excellent Li-
gotti issue of Daqon , I Most of the
tales, however, have been somewhat
touched up by the author for their
appearance here.

Robert M. Price, Editor

Hallowmas 1989 / 3

THE PRODIGY OF DREAMS

By Thomas Ligotti

. . I conceived my ideal leavetaking from this earth

— a drama prepared by strange portents, swiftly de-
veloped by dreams and visions nurtured in an atmos-
phere of sublime dread, growing overnight like some
gaudy fungus in a forgotten cellar. . . .

-The Travel Diaries of Arthur Emerson

It seemed to Arthur Emerson that
the swans, those perennial guests
of the estate, had somehow become
strange. Yet his knowledge of
their natural behavior was vague,
providing him with little idea of
precisely how they had departed
from this behavior. But he strong-
ly sensed that there had indeed
been such a departure, an imper-
ceptible drifting into the peculiar.
Suddenly these creatures, which
had become as tedious to him as
everything else, filled him with an
astonishment he had not known in
many years.

That morning they were gathered
at the center of the lake, barely
visible within a milky haze which
hovered above still waters. For as
long as he observed them, they did
not allow themselves the slightest
motion toward the grassy shores
circling the lake. Each of them —
there were four— faced a separate
direction, as though some antagon
ism existed within their order.
Then their sleek, ghostly forms re-
volved with a mechanical ease and
came to huddle around an imaginary
point of focus. For a moment their
heads nodded slightly toward one
another, bowing in wordless prayer;
but soon they stretched their snak-
ing necks in unison, elevated their
orange and black bills toward the
thick mist above, and gazed into its
depths. There followed a series of
haunting cries unlike anything ever
heard on the vast grounds of that
isolated estate.

Arthur Emerson now wondered if
something he could not see was
disturbing the swans. As he stood

at the tall windows which faced the
lake, he made a mental note to have
Graff go down there and find out
what he could. Possibly some un-
welcome animal was now living in
the dense woods nearby. And as
he further considered the matter,
it appeared that the numerous wild
ducks, those brownish goblins that
were always either visible or audi-
ble somewhere in the vicinity of the
lake, had already vacated the area.
Or perhaps they were only ob-
scured by the unusually heavy mist
of that peculiar morning.

Arthur Emerson spent most of
the morning and afternoon in the
library. At intervals he was visited
by a very black cat. an aloof and
somewhat phantasmal member of the
small Emerson household. Eventual-
ly it fell asleep on a sunny window
ledge, while its master wandered
among the countless uncatalogued
volumes he had accumulated over
the past fifty years or so.

During his childhood, the collec-
tion which filled the library's dark
shelves was a common one, and
much of it he had given away or
destroyed in order to provide room
for other works. Fie was the only
scholar in a lengthy succession of
businessmen of one kind or another,
the last living member of the old
family; at his death, the estate
would probably pass into the hands
of a distant relative whose name
and face he did not know. But this
was not of any great concern to
Arthur Emerson: resignation to his
own inconsequence, along with that
of all things of the earth, was a
philosophy he had nurtured for

4 / Crypt of Cthulhu

some time, and with considerable
success .

In his younger years he had
travelled a great deal, these excur-
sions often relating to his studies,
which could be approximately de-
scribed as ethnological bordering on
the esoteric. Throughout various
quarters of what now seemed to him
a shrunken, almost claustrophobic
world, he had attempted to satisfy
an inborn craving to comprehend
what then seemed to him an aston-
ishing, even shocking existence.
Arthur Emerson recalled that while
still a child he felt strangely op
pressed by the gaping expanses he
sensed in the world around him, a
genuinely physical response to the
venues which may have appeared
merely as a patch of pink sky above
leafless trees in twilight or as an
abandoned room where dust settled
on portraits and old furniture. To
him, however, these appearances
disguised realms of an entirely dif-
ferent nature. For within these
imagined or divined spheres there
existed a certain . . . confusion, a
swirling, fluttering motion that was
belied by the relative order of the
seen .

Only on rare occasions could he
enter these unseen spaces, and al-
ways unexpectedly. A striking ex-
perience of this kind took place in
his childhood years and involved a
previous generation of the present-
day swans, which he had paused
one warm summer afternoon to con-
template from a high grassy bank.
Perhaps their smooth drifting and
gliding upon the water had induced
in him something like a hypnotic
state. The ultimate effect, how-
ever, was not the serene catatonia
of hypnosis, but a whirling flight
through a glittering threshold which
opened within the transparent air
itself, propelling him into a kaleido
scopic universe where space con-
sisted only of multi-colored and
ever-changing currents, as of wind
or water, and where time did not
exist .

Later he became a student of the
imaginary lands hypothesized by
legends and theologies, and he had

sojourned in places which concealed
or suggested unknown orders of
existences. Among ttie volumes in
his library were several of his own
authorship, bibliographical shadows
of his lifetime obsessions. His body
of works included such titles as: In
the Margins of Paradise , The Fo r-
gotten Universe of the Vicoli , and
The Secret Cods and Othe r S tudies .
For many feverish years he was
burdened with the sensation, an
ancient one to be sure, that the in-
credible sprawl of human history
was yet no more than a pathetically
partial record of an infinitely vast
and shadowed chronicle of universal
metamorphoses. How much greater,
then, was his feeling that his own
pathetic history formed a practically
invisible fragment of what itself was
merely an obscure splinter of the
infinite. Somehow he needed to ex-
carcerate himself from this dungeon
cell to which he had been con-
demned; in the end, however, he
broke beneath the weight of his
aspirations. And as the years
passed, the only mystery which
seemed worthy of his interest, and
to his amazement, was that unknown
day which would inaugurate his
personal eternity; that incredible
day on which the sun simply would
not rise, and forever would begin.

Arthur Emerson pulled a rather
large book down from its high shelf
and ambled toward a cluttered desk
to make some notes for a work
which would very likely be his last.
Its tentative title: Dynasties of

Dust .

Toward nightfall he suspended
his work. With much stiffness, he
walked to the window ledge where
the cat slept soundly in the fading
light of dusk. But its body seemed
to rise and fall a little too vigor
ously for sleep, and it made a
strange wheezing music somehow
unlike its usual murmuring purr.
The cat opened its eyes and rolled
sideways, as it often did when in-
viting a hand to stroke its glossy
black fur. But as soon as Arthur
Emerson laid his palm upon that
smooth coat, his fingers were rap-
idly gnawed. The cat then leaped

Hallowmas 1989 /

to the floor and ran off into the
house, while Arthur Emerson watched
his own blood trickling from the
bite .

All that evening he felt restless,
profoundly at odds with the atmos-
phere of each room he entered and
then soon abandoned. He wandered
the house, telling himself that he
was in search of his ebony pet, in
order to establish the terms of
their misunderstanding. But this
pretext would every so often dis-
solve, and it then became clear to
Arthur Emerson that he searched
for something less tangible than a
runaway cat. The rooms, however
high their ceilings, suffocated him
with their shadows; his footsteps,
echoing sharply down long gleaming
corridors, sounded like the clacking
of bones. The house was his luxu-
rious and many-chambered mausole-
um, an expansive tomb.

He finally abandoned the search
and allowed fatigue to guide him to
his bedroom, where immediately he
opened a window in the hope that
something without a name would fly
from the house. But he now dis-

covered that it was not only the
house which was swollen with mys-
teries; it was the very night itself.
A nocturnal breeze began lifting
the curtains; it was the same tem-
perature as the air of the room and
together they mingled with an ap-
palling intimacy. Shapeless clumps

of clouds floated with a mechanical
complacency across a horrible stone
grey sky, a sky which itself seemed
shapeless rather than evenly infi-
nite. To his left he saw that the
inner surface of the open window
reflected a man's face, and he
pushed the fear-stricken thing out
into the darkness.

Arthur Emerson eventually slept
that night, but he also dreamed.
His dream was without definite form,
a realm of fog where crafty shadows
glided. their dark mass shifting
fluently. For an unknown Interval
he haunted the edges of this re-
gion, feeling that something else
was involved with the masking mist
before him, that this was the un-

canny locus of a certain thing, of
a shape unlike any he had ever
known. Then, through the queerly
gathered and drifting clouds of fog,
he saw a shadow whose dark mon-
strosity made the others seem
shapely and radiant. It was a de-
formed colossus, a disfigured monu-
ment carved from the absolute den
sity of the blackest abyss. And
now the lesser shadows, the pale
and meager shadows, seemed to join
in a squealing chorus of praise to
the greater one. He gazed at the
Cyclopean thing in a trance of hor-
ror, until its mountainous mass be-
gan to move, slowly stretching out
some senseless part of itself, flex
ing what might have been a mis-
shapen arm. And when he awoke,
scattering the bedcovers, he felt a
warm breeze wafting in through a
window which he could not remem-
ber having left open.

The next morning it became ap
parent that there would be no relief
from the uncanny influences which
seemed still to be lingering from the
day before. All about the Emerson
estate a terrific fog had formed,
blinding the inhabitants of the
house to most of the world beyond
the windows; and what few shapes
remained visible— the closest and
darkest trees, a few rose bushes
pressing against the windows—
seemed drained of all earthly sub
stance, creating a landscape both
infinite and imprisoning, an estate
of dream. Unseen in the fog, the
swans were calling out like ban-
shees down by the lake. And even
Graff. when he appeared in the
library attired in a bulky grounds-
keeper's jacket and soiled trousers,
looked less like a man than like a
specter of ill prophecy.

"Are you certain," said Arthur
Emerson, who was seated at his
desk, "that you have nothing to
report about those creatures?"

"No sir," replied Graff. "Noth-
ing."

There was, however, something
else Graff had discovered, some-
thing which he thought the master
of the house should see for himself.

b I Crypt of Cthulhu

Together they travelled down sev
eral stairways leading to the vari
ous cellars and storage chambers
beneath the house. On the way
Graff explained that, as also or
dered, he had searched for the cat,
which had not been seen since last
evening. Arthur Emerson only
gazed at his man and nodded in
silence, while inwardly babbling to
himself about some strangeness he
perceived in the old retainer. Be-
tween every few phrases the man
would begin humming, or rather
singing at the back of his throat
in an entirely peculiar manner.

After making their way far into
the dark catacombs of the Emerson
house, they arrived at a remote
room which seemed to have been
left unfinished. There were no
lighting fixtures (except the one
recently improvised by Graff), the
stone walls were unplastered and
unpainted, and the floor was of
hard, bare earth. Graff pointed
downward, and his crooked finger
wandered in an arc through the
sepulchral dimness of the room.
Arthur Emerson now saw that the
place had been turned into a char
nel house for the remains of small
animals: mice, rats, birds, squir

rels, even a few young possums
and raccoons. He already knew the
cat to be an obsessive hunter, but
it seemed strange that these car-
casses had all been brought to this
room, as if it were a kind of sane
turn of mutilation and death.

While contemplating this macabre
chamber, Arthur Emerson noticed
peripherally that Graff was fidget-
ting with some object concealed in
his pocket. How strange indeed
the old servant had become.

"What have you got there?" Ar-
thur Emerson asked.

"Sir 7 " Graff replied, as though
tiis manual gyrations had proceeded
without his awareness. "Oh. this."
he said, revealing a metal garden-
ing implement with four clawlike
prongs. "I was doing some work
outdoors; that is, I was intending
to do so, if there was time."

"Time? On a day like this?"

Obviously embarrassed and at a

loss to explain himself, Graff pointed
the taloned tool at the decomposing
carcasses. "None of the animals
actually seem to have been eaten,"
he quietly observed, and that curi
ous piping in his throat sounded
almost louder than his words.

"No," Arthur Emerson agreed
with some bewilderment. He then
reached up to grasp a thick black
cord which Graff had slung over
the rafters, trying to manipulate
the bulb to more fully illuminate the
room. Incautiously, perhaps, Ar-
thur Cmerson was thinking that
there existed some method to ttie
way the bodies of the slaughtered
creatures were positioned across
the entire floor. Graff's next re-
mark approximated the unformed
perception of his employer: "Like

a trail of dominos winding round
and round. But no true sense to
it."

Arthur Emerson readily granted
the apt analogy to a maze of domi-
nos, hut concerning the second of
Graff's statements there suddenly
appeared to be some doubt. For at
that moment Arthur Emerson looked
up and saw a queerly shaped stain,
as if made by mold or moisture,
upon the far wall.

"Shall I clean the place out?"
asked Graff, raising the metal claw.

"What? No," decided Arthur
Emerson as he gazed at the shape-
less, groping horror that appeared
to have crawled from his own dream
and stained itself into the stone
before him. "Leave everything ex-
actly as it is," he ordered the old
whistling servant.

Arthur Emerson returned to the
library, and there he began to ex-
plore a certain shelf of books. This
shelf comprised his private archives
of handsomely bound travel diaries
he had kept over the years. He
withdrew one after another, paged
through each volume, and then
replaced it. Finally he found the
one he wanted, which was the rec-
ord of a visit to central and south-
ern Italy made when he was a young
man. Settling down at his desk, he
leaned into the words before him.

Hallowmas 1989 / 7

After reading only a few sentences
he began to wonder who this
strange, lyrical creature, this ghost,
might be. No doubt himself, but in
some previous incarnation, some
bizarre anterior life.

— Spoleto (Ides of October)

What wonders dwell within
the vicoli! How often can I
celebrate those fabulous little
thoroughfares which form a
maze of magic and dreams, and
how often can I praise the me-
dieval hill towns of Umbria
which are woven of such
streets? Guiding one into court-
yards, cloisters, and blind al-
leys, they are snug roads in-
vented for the meanderings of
sleepwalkers. One is embraced
by the gray walls of high
houses, one is nestled beneath
their wood-beamed roofs and
beneath innumerable arches as
they cut the monotonous day
into a wealth of shadows and
frame the stars at night within
random curves and angles.
Nightfall in the vicoli! Pale
yellow lanterns awake like ap
paritions in the last moments of
twilight, claiming the dark nar-
row lanes for their own, grant-
ing an enchanted but somewhat
uneasy passage to those who
would walk there. And last
evening I found myself among
these spirits.

Intoxicated as much by the
Via Porta Fuga as by the wine
I had drunk at dinner, I wan-
dered across bridges, beneath
arches and overhanging houses,
up and down battered stair-
ways, past ivy hung walls and
black windows masked with iron
grillwork. I turned a corner
and glimpsed a small open door-
way ahead. Without thinking, I
looked inside as I passed, see-
ing only a tiny niche, not even
a room, which must have been
constructed in the space be-
tween two buildings. All I could
clearly discern were two small

candles which were the source
and focus of a confusion of
shadows. From inside a man’s
voice spoke to me in English:
"A survival of the ancient
world," said the voice; which
carried the accent of a culti
vated Englishman, sounding
very bored and mechanical and
very out of place in the circum-
stances. And I also must note
a strange whistling quality in
his words, as if his naturally
low speaking voice were reso-
nating with faintly high-pitched
overtones. "Yes, sir. I am
speaking to you," he continued.
"A fragment of antiquity, a sur-
vival of the ancient world.
Nothing to fear, there is no fee
demanded . "

He now appeared in the
doorway, a balding and flabby
middle-aged gentleman in a tat-
tered, tieless suit — the image of
his own weary voice, the voice
of an exhausted fairgrounds
huckster. His face, as it re-
flected the pale yellow light of
the lantern beside the open
doorway, was a calm face; but
its calmness seemed to derive
from a total despair of soul
rather than from a serenity of
mind. "I am referring to the
altar of the god," he said.
"Whatever you have heard, that
one is not among those deities
you may have heard about; that
one is not among those divini-
ties you may have laughed
about. It may be distantly re-
lated, perhaps, to those nu-
mina of Koman cesspools and
sewage systems. But it is not
a mere Cloacina, not a Mephitis
or Robigo. In name, the god
is known as Cynothoglys: the
god without shape, the god of
decompositions, the mortician
god of both gods and men, the
metamortician of all things.
There is no fee demanded."

I remained where I stood,
and then the man stepped out
into the little vicolo in order to
allow me a better view through
the open doorway, into the can-

8 / Crypt of Cthulhu

dlelit room beyond. I could
now see that the candles were
shining on either side of a low
slab, cheap candles that sent
out a quivering haze of smoke.
Between these tapers was an
object which I could not define,
some poor shapeless thing, per-
haps the molten relic of a vol-
canic eruption at some distant
time, but certainly not the
image of an ancient deity. There
seemed to be nothing and no
one else inhabiting that sinister
little nook. I may now contend
that, given the unusual circum
stances described above, the
wisest course of action would
have been to mumble a few po-
lite excuses and move on. But
I have also described the spell
which is cast by the vicoli, by
their dimly glowing and twisted
depths. Entranced by these
dreamlike surroundings, I was
thus prepared to accept the
strange gentleman's offer, if
only to enhance my feeling of
intoxication with all the form-
less mysteries whose name was
now Cynothoglys.

"But be solemn, sir. I warn
you to be solemn."

I stared at the man for a
brief moment, and in that mo-
ment this urging of my solemni-
ty seemed connected in some
way to his own slavish and im-
poverished state, which I found
it difficult to believe had always
been his condition. "The god
will not mock your devotions,
your prayers," he whispered
and whistled. "Nor will it be
mocked . "

Then, stepping through the
little doorway, I approached the
primitive altar. Occupying its
center was a dark, monolithic
object whose twisting shapeless-
ness has placed it beyond sim-
ple analogies in my imagination.
Yet there was something in its
contours— a certain dynamism,
like that of great, crablike roots
springing forth from the ground
— which suggested more than
mere chaos or random creation.

Perhaps the following statement
could be more sensibly attrib-
uted to the mood of the moment,
but there seemed a definite
power somehow linked to this
gnarled effigy, a gloomy force
which was disguised by its
monumentally static appearance.
Toward the summit of the muti-
lated sculpture, a crooked arm-
like appendage extended out
ward in a frozen grasp, as if it
had held this position tor un-
known eons and at any time
might resume, and conclude, its
movement .

I drew closer to the con-
torted idol, remaining in its
presence far longer than I in
tended. That I actually found
myself composing a kind of sup-
plication tells more than I am
presently able about my mental
and spiritual state last evening.
Was it this beast of writhing
stone or the spell of the vicoli
which inspired rny prayer and
determined its form? It was, I
think, something which they
shared, a suggestion of great
things: great secrets and great
sorrows, great wonders and
catastrophes, great destinies,
great doom, and a single great
death. My own. Drugged by
this inspiration, I conceived my
ideal leavetaking from this earth
—a drama prepared by strange
portents, swiftly developed by
dreams and visions nurtured in
an atmosphere of sublime dread,
growing overnight like some
gaudy fungus in a forgotten
cellar, and always with the aw-
ful hand of the mortician god
working the machinery behind
the scenes. Beasts and men
would form an alliance with
great Cynothoglys, the elements
themselves would enter into the
conspiracy, a muted vortex of
strange forces all culminating in
a spectral denoument, all con
verging to deliver me to the
inevitable, but deliver me in a
manner worthy of the most ex-
pansive and unearthly sensa-
tions of my life. I conceived

Hallowmas 1989 / 9

the primal salvation of tearing
flesh, of seizure by the gotl
and the ecstatic rending of the
frail envelope of skin and sinew.
And as others only sink into
their deaths — into mine I would
soar.

But how could I have desired
this to be? I now wonder, fully
sober following my debauch of
dreams. Perhaps I am too re-
pentant of my prayer and try
to reassure myself by my very
inability to imagine the exact
state of mind which could ac-
commodate this vision and give
it a place in the history of the
world. The mere memory of this
delirium. I expect, will serve to
carry me through many of the
barren days ahead, though only
to abandon me in the end to a
pathetic demise of meaningless
pain. By then I may have for
gotten the god I encountered,
along with the one who served
him like a slave. Both seem to
have disappeared from the
vicoli, their temple standing
empty and abandoned. And
henceforth I will probably imag-
ine that it was not I who came
to the vicoli to meet the god,
but the god who came to meet
me .

After reading these old words,
Arthur Emerson sat silent and sol-
emn at his desk. Was it over for
him, then? All the portents had
appeared and all the functionaries
of his doom were now assembled,
both outside the library door —
where the footfall of man and beast
sounded— and beyond the library
windows, where a horrible thing
without shape had begun to loom
out of the fog, reaching through
the walls and windows as if they
too were merely mist. Were a thou
sand thoughts of outrage and dread
now supposed to rise within him at
the prospect of this occult extermi-
nation? After all, he was about to
have forced upon him that dream of
death, that whim of some young ad-
venturer who could not resist being
granted a wish or two by a tourist

attraction .

And now the crying of the swans
had begun to sound from the lake
and through the fog and into the
house. Their shrieks were echoing
everywhere, and he might have
predicted as much. Would he soon
be required to add his own shrieks
to theirs; was it now time to be
overcome by the wonder of the un-
known and the majesty of fate; was
this how it was done in the world
of doom 7

Risking an accusation of bad
manners, Arthur Emerson failed to
rise from his chair to greet the

guest he had invited so long ago.

"You are too late," he said in a

dry voice. "But since you have
taken the trouble . . ." And the

god, like some obedient slave or
machine, descended upon its incu-
rious victim, while the screams of
the swans soared high into the
muffling fog.

MAIL'CALL (from page 65)
polishing. In my enthusiasm, I
not only completed some Love-
craftian poems ( The Demons o f
the Upper Air ) and did a series
of dark starlit illustrations for
his tales (splatter-stencils), I
also inserted a few Mythos ref-
erences into my Fafhrd-Mouser
novella Adept' s Gambit (not
published until 10 years later),
and I wrote some 3.000 words of
a modern-setting Mythos novel-
ette to be titled T he Burrowers
Beneath .

Then Lovecraft died. I put
away the fragments of the nov-
elette and soon wrote the My-
thos-references out of Adept's
Gambit ; they clearly had no
place there.

In answer to Mr. Berglund, I
would say that I was wrong on two
points: the story was begun before

Lovecraft's death (Robert Bloch
spoke for many of Lovecraft's young
disciples, I think, when he told Lin
Carter that after Lovecraft's death,
the fun went out of trying to write
Mythos fiction), and Leiber did not
(continued on page 36)

10 / Crypt of Cthulhu

ALLAN AND ADELAIDE:
AN ARABESQUE

By Thomas Ligotti

There are some qualities— some incorporate things
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.

POE: Sonnet — Silence.

1 . The brand new beasts

We tried, my twin sister and I.
to be rid of them. They had al-
ways been my chief grievance about
the old house. Despite their nature
as a sort of inheritance, I could
never place them in the same order
as the house itself. To me their
necessity was not at all evident,
not like the foundation of the house
or the particular arrangement of its
rooms. And this, I found, was
true: they had no relationship to

the physical aspects of the house
and its furnishings. Their presence
was more like that of t Me grotesque
shadows in our lamplit hallways, a
shifting and spectral element of the
scene. What a fright to have these
shadows, but what a stranger fright
would be their absence! Nonethe-
less, to effect such an absence was
precisely my ambition.

So it was that Adelaide and I
descended into the deepest cellar of
our house to perform the exorcism.
By pure chance I had found the
exact book, among all the volumes
of our vast library, that would
finally make this possible. Adelaide
had asked me to find a particular
book for her one sullen afternoon,
and it was right beside it that I
found the other book. What good
fortune this courtesy to my sister
had brought me, though I am never
entirely surprised when anything of
a pleasant nature is connected with
gentle Adelaide.

It was she who made the exor-
cism a success, even lending the
ceremony a measure of queer ex-
citement. In the dripping silence
of that stonework cellar, thick can

dies burned on either side of the
statuesque Adelaide, who read in
the most compelling tones from the
book I held open before her. It
was written in a language that I
but half knew, though it seemed
the very tongue of Adelaide's soul.
One by one I turned the pages
when her instructing eyes told me
to do so. Oh, the virtuosity of
her hermetic performance! From
the subterranean passages below
that cellar floor the formless squeals
of bestial things continually ema-
nated like the seeping cold of the
abyss. How long I had listened to
those maddening sounds, which
sometimes were perceptible in every
part of the house and even pene-
trated the walls of my sleep. Now
would be their end. Adelaide spoke
the final words of the ritual, and
as the echoes died so did the sounds
of those things below us become
silence. I was free of them.

This. I thought, was the begin-
ning of a golden age in the old
house. For the first time in its
immemorial history the house would
be filled with only the natural

sounds of its residents and those
comforting noises of its ripe struc-
ture. For the first time I could
hear, of a winter's evening, my
sister's voluptuous singing without
fear of her voice merging with that
demonic chorus below. And for a
brief time this state of bliss en-
dured. Adelaide sang while I ac
companied her on my guitar, the
wind of moonless nights harmonized
with our music, and all was like a
perfect piece of an eternal dream.

It was following |ust such an
evening of song that everything

Hallowmas 1989 / 11

changed, reverted to what It had
once been and even worse. In the
darkness I awoke among the night-
mare-tangled covers of my bed.
Sounds had disturbed my sleep,
sounds like nothing I had ever
heard or hope to hear. What shapes,
what forms of corrupt generation
made such a bestial cacophony? Ev-
ery corner of my room, of the en-
tire house, was tainted with surge
after surge of acoustic foulage.

I ran to my sister's bed chamber
but found it empty and her covers
undisturbed, a situation I perceived
immediately due to my gift of acute
vision in the absence of light. The
thought of tier roaming alone among
the noises of that night caused me
near crippling apprehension . Of all
dread misfortunes, was she perhaps
on one of the lower floors, where
the diseased din rose to its most
intense potency? Running down the
corridor, I arrived at the top of
the stairway and to my relief saw
the figure of Adelaide already as-
cending .

But site seemed to be lumbering
up the stairs, lacking her usual
quality of almost airborn grace.
And of all things, it now appeared
as if she were walking backwards .
for I saw naught but her hair tum-
bling over that pretty face. Even
more curious, it seemed that two
eyes peered out at me from among
her nest of locks. But in the dark
ness of the middle of the night,
especially that night, one is likely
to witness anything, and I rubbed
this strange illusion from my sleep
ensorcelled eyes, now to see my
sister looking as she always had.
She reached the top of the stairs,
and I embraced her with fear of a
thousand things.

"Adelaide, what is happening?" I
cried. "Have they returned to tor-
ment us?"

She did not reply immediately
but rushed us to the sanctum of
her bed chamber, wtiere I first
noticed the torn and sullied condi-
tion of her nightgown.

"Do not worry about my gown,
my brother. I have been . . .

working this night. There is not

sufficient time in the day for the
ctiores required to keep our house
as we wish it to remain."

"But did you not hear the
sounds? What are they, Adelaide,
do you know? I've never heard
such horror, not even before we
went into the cellar and drove them
out. But they did not make sounds
like this. Oh tell me, have the old
beasts returned? If so, we will use
words of even greater power to
exorcise them once again. We still
have the book."

When I had finished, Adelaide
looked into my face with infinite
solemnity, and said:

"We still have the book, my
brother, but it is of no use against
these ones."

"But they are the old beasts," I
argued. "We know them well, their
fears and weaknesses."

"Listen to me, Allan," instructed
my sister. "These are not our old
friends, not the ones who made the
noises we had grown to know over
the years. These, Allan, are the
new beasts . "

Without entirely comprehending
her words, I cried out:

"But they will destroy our beau
tiful home. They are not like the
others. They have the run of the
house ! "

"It is only for this night, when
first they come. You were not
here the first night of the old
ones . "

"Nor were you, my twin."

"They are always like this the
first night," she continued without
answering my protest.

At that moment I thought I heard
something sniffing and wheezing

outside the door. Holding one of

the lamps my sister had lit, I opened
the door and cast its light into the
hallway. Whatever was there had

moved out of my sight, but for a
second I glimpsed a shadow which
lumbered at a queer removal from
its source. After this sight I in-
formed Adelaide that for her pro-
tection I would stay with her

through the course of what would
no doubt be a sleepless night.
Following a moment of strange re

12 / Crypt of Cthulhu

luctance on her part, she agreed to
my intentions.

Despite the trauma and tragedy
of that evening, courageous Ade-
laide soon retired within the cur-
tains of her bed and fell into a
guiet sleep. For what seemed an

eternity I stood a vigil by the door,
imagining what destruction and
stench we would have to confront
when we descended into the house
next morning. And I suffered that
peculiar terror of knowing nothing
would ever be the same again.

But eventually, following Ade-
laide's fearless example, I too ig-
nored the infernal invasion of our
home and allowed myself to rest.
Soundlessly I crept over to the bed
curtains and pulled them back to
witness Adelaide's dreaming seren-
ity. With sorrow as my soporific, I
curled up at the foot of my sister's
bed . . . and slept.

2. The twin who went to town

My sister Adelaide sometimes
forces herself to leave the immense
comforts of our old house and trav-
els into town, a place where I have
never been. Though we are twins,
identical in many habits and activi-
ties, somehow this burden has fallen
upon her shoulders. "Allan," she
says to me, "do not worry while I'm
away. I will be back soon. Then
we'll do something special. And
take good care of the house, my
brother. You know how I like to
think of it every moment that we're
separated." I wave to her as she
walks down the road leading to the
town. Even when she can no longer
see me, I wave. And I really don't
worry very much about her, for I
know she is quite able to take care
of herself.

I once asked Adelaide if I might
not accompany her on one of these
trips into town. For some time the
idea had been plaguing my mind.
One night, not long before, I had
awakened from a wild carnival of a
dream from which I could save no
memory concerning its particular
adventures. But upon opening my
eyes I uncontrollably called out
something into the darkness. Two

words: "The town!" It was after

this dream that I appealed to my
sister for a chance to see this place
which for me was such an obscur-
ity. Would it forever remain so!

"You do not know what it is like,
Allan," she answered. "The peo-
ple there are not as you are. They
are unnaturally confused; always in
strange turmoil and doing strange
things. They do not have your
sense of reason or your balance of
temperament. You must stay as
you are, then, and remain at the
house."

My sister flattered me, for she
has always been the twin with the
true powers of reason and deep
knowledge. In many disciplines
she has been my instructress. So
when she advised that I should be
the one to keep myself at home, I
listened closely and complied.

Adelaide returned late the other
night from her most recent excur-
sion to the town. I was already
asleep but awoke when I heard a
series of sounds tracing my sister's
way to her bed chamber and a well-
deserved rest. Later that night I
was awakened by a second commo-
tion. At least, I think I was awake
and not dreaming. (There are so
many confusions in the middle of
the night.) In any case, what I
heard was a thunderous, insistent
pounding on our front door. And
there was a voice, the voice of a
worrlan if I am not mistaken. It was
difficult to tell because of the storm
and the fact that the voice was un-
naturally straining itself to be heard
above the violent rain and thunder.
Perhaps that is all I really heard.
But at one point the voice sounded
so definite. Quite clearly I heard
the unknown woman scream out:
"You she-devil! What have you
done to them? You didn't need them
all." After this outburst, which
rang lucidly in my ears, the voice
became lost among all the moaning
turbulence of the storm.

The next morning was decorated
by a heavy mist, making it almost
impossible to see out our windows.
As we serenely passed the morning
hours, I told Adelaide of my dubi-

Hallowmas 1 989 / 1 3

ous experience the night before.
She was tired, and I'm not sure she
heard my story properly.

"You see how mad those towns-
people are?"

I had said nothing specifically
about any townspeople, only the
strange woman, who might have
come from the countryside of my

imagination .

"They

spread lies

even in

your

dreams,

, " she con-

tinued .

"So

1 hope you will listen

to me from now on and

never again

mention

that

town.

This is for

your own

good

, Allan."

Ever

since

then 1

have never

initiated

this

subject

in conversa-

tion, though occasionally Adelaide
forgets herself and alludes to the
matter, saying: "Oh, those horri-

ble people." But I do not talk
about them; I do not even think
about their unspeakable lives. I
cannot help, however, those things
that come to me in dreams. Ade-
laide cannot blame me for what hap-
pens there.

And lately I feel there has been
some terrible trouble with my
dreams, though not only the ones
about the town. There are other
dreams, more-how shall I say it? —
more loathsomely reverbe rant in
their power. I only hope that this
power will soon exhaust itself in
the coming nights, like a frighten-
ing storm throughout which one is
allowed to sleep.

Please let this be so.

3. The demented deacons

I have seen the soul of the uni-
verse . . . and it is insane.

A dream has all but laid my
world to waste. Even now I still
doubt if I have fully made my way
back to the waking realm. But if I
have not, the difference is no long-
er a great one: certain signs have

told me there is nothing left that
waits on my return. It was a hor-
ror. Shadowy things frolicked in
the dream like lurid acrobats. And
vast stretches of space. But I
should start at the beginning,
though no dream has one that can
ever be remembered.

I found myself in a windowless

room lit by candles on metal stands
of varying heights. I recall feeling
that the room was in a strange
place somewhere outside the house.
Opposite me was a dark curtain
which hung from the ceiling to the
floor and spanned the entire dis-
tance between the walls, dividing
the room into sections of unknown
relative proportions. Eventually I
came to realise that I was bound to
a throne-like chair facing the cur
tain. Behind the chair, and in the
periphery of my vision, passed back
and forth a number of slow moving
shapes. These shapes, from the
little that could be seen of them,
resembled figures on playing cards.
(And how this painfully recalls
those wonderful games Adelaide was
always teaching me.) At some point
I came to think of these figures as
"The Demented Deacons."

They were carrying on a kind of
inquisition, with myself as the sole
object defining their roles. They
asked me strange questions which
suggested matters having nothing
whatever to do with my life.

"Who are your gods?" they asked,
somehow in unison. Ignorant silence
was my answer. They became more
clever, gleefully tittering at the
virtuosity of their interrogation.

"Do your gods soar?" they in-
quired, pantomiming the question

with outstretched wings that were
not wings, nor were they arms. I
saw no harm in giving a positive
answer, which could be nothing but
complimentary to any gods worthy
of the name.

"And do they not sometimes de-
scend to earth?" the Deacons con-
tinued. To affirm this question, I
reasoned, would be safe enough,
since its answer was nearly self-
implied. Complacently I awaited the
next question. For this one they

had to confer among themselves for
a few moments; then, while the
others looked on, one of them

stepped forward and addressed me.

"When they descend, do they not
begin to lumber like beasts? Do
they sometimes get down and crawl,
your gods?"

I should have remained silent

1 *4 / Crypt of Cthulhu

but instead I shouted, "No more of
your questions!" This outburst
seemed to please the Deacons to no
end as a minor revelation. They
next returned to less suggestively
sinister questions. Once again a
single figure, different from the
previous one, came forward to in
terrogate me.

"Do your gods sometimes speak
in tongues strange to you? Do
these ones sing their words and use
magic? Do they look sidelong to
admire themselves in mirrors?"

Again their questions seemed in-
nocent ones, and ones whose denial
would be out of keeping with any
concept of godhood. Of course my
gods, though I knew them not, were
learned in the ways of language and
sorcery and indeed had much to
admire about themselves.

There was now excitement among
the figures, even as they lethargi-
cally milled around my chair, speak-
ing to one another in low tones.
There was some important matter to
be deliberated upon, and soon they
seemed to have reached a kind of
agreement. judging by a certain
mood which distinctly emanated from
these figures. A new phase of the
inquisition was to begin, one for
which the interrogative talents of
the Deacons were now inadequate.
They moved away from my ctiair,
their ranks perhaps dispersing and
dissolving back into the shadows
whence they came.

I was now alone, my eyes fixed
upon the curtain that veiled some
indefinite portion of the room. What-
ever was beyond the curtain would
continue the inquisition, I thought
as if this were obvious. And con-
sidering the remarkable questions
put to me by the playing-card fig
ures, how much more remarkable
would be the interrogations from
the darker side of the curtain,
where there seemed only an un-
known and lightless abyss. I waited
with an imaginary forevision of the
horrific wonders to come.

However, events did not unfold
as I expected. Yes, there were
questions asked of me from that re-
gion on the other side of the cur

tain. But with these questions the
dream diverged into greater realms
of nightmare. For the source of
these questions was the very genius
of demonic dread — that Horror
Maker known to me from a thousand
dreams where sudden dread usurps
all serenity like a panic cry of
"Fire," of "Murder," of stealthy
"Invader . "

Its presence always permeates
the dream: fog with a pallid face

drifting in through an open window.
It fuses its tormented spirit with
dead objects, animating things which
should not move or live, breathing
a blasphemous life into the unliv-
ing. One glance at a design on the
wall catches this Horror Maker en-
gendering a world of writhing crea-
tures there. It lives in all things,
and they tilt and flutter with a
menacing absence of purpose or
predictability. Finally it melds with
the slowly coagulating shadows, and
now it is without limits as it spreads
to command a domain of quivering
darkness. The universe becomes
its impossible body, its corpse. As
the blackness of space is its cor-
rupting blood, so the planets are
multiple skulls of the freakish beast;
the paths of doomed meteors trace
the architecture of its labyrinthine
skeletal frame; spasms of dying
galaxies are its nervous tics; and
strange stellar venues of incompre-
hensible properties are the cham-
bers of its soul. Within this uni-
verse the dreamer is trapped, his
dreams confined to the interior of a
form other than his own. But fi-
nally this Horror-Maker moves from
outside to inside the dreamer, sub-
verting his heroic autonomy, and
becoming one with him. Now it is
he himself who generates those
nightmares from that design on the
wall. Every glimpse conjures uni-
verses of cavorting horrors, and
ultimately even the crystal absence
of the void becomes populated by
every monstrosity that can or can-
not exist. There is no refuge from
the living void, the terror of the
invisible. And the focus of my fear
sharpened into hideous implications
about my sister and myself. The

Hallowmas 1989 / 1 5

interrogations of the Horror- Maker
could not be evaded, unless I was
willing to remain in that dream for-
ever .

"I could not murder my sister,"
I finally screamed. "I loved her
with all my soul." But the thing
behind the curtain— enveloping , om-
nicient— continued its torturing
queries as insistently as ocean
waves collapsing on a dead shore.
"No, none of that is true; she was
not those things. She was my twin,
my companion, my teacher, my — "

I could not go on. I wanted to
do something horrible to myself and
bring everything to an end. And
what could be more catastrophic
than to draw back the curtains be-
fore me, gaining the most insane
and self-destroying revelation imag-
inable. But I was bound to the
chair, or so I thought before real-
ising the truth: that I had never

been so fettered, that it was only
some perverse illusion which caused
me to believe otherwise.

I rose stiffly from the chair, ap-
prehensive of my new freedom, and
approached the curtain. Something
now seemed familiar about it, some-
thing in its folds and texture. But
there was no opportunity to think
at length about these things, for
my terror was becoming too intense
to bear any longer. Seizing the
soft material in my hands at the
point where the two sides of the
curtain came together, I resolutely
spread my arms and gazed within .

There, in the dark recesses
which I searched with my sight, I
saw nothing more than another cur-
tain, an inner curtain that was a
twin of the outer one.

I awoke screaming. And this
initial terror was infinitely exacer-
bated when I found that I was not
in my own room but was lying in
my sister's bed . . . alone.

A delaide !

4. The last lesson

I must cease this incessant talk-
ing to myself. Any moment now my
searching of the house will reveal
the place where she has secreted

herself, and then I'll have someone
else to talk with once again. But
suppose she is no longer in the
house. Suppose she has gone to
the town again, damn her. No, I
mustn't say that . . . she has ev-
ery right. Adelaide! Aaadelllaide !
Where are you? Perhaps I

shouldn't be looking for her in
these clammy cellars. Why should
she be down here? And that
horrible squealing of the beasts
from below is worse than ever.

I can hear them all over the house
now. Silence, you sullen filthy

fiends !

I will find her despite

you .

There she is.

No, just the mir

ror at the end of the hallway. Oh,
Adelaide, I'm still the fool you al-
ways knew I was. I think you are
lost but your presence greets me
every place I look. Here now in
the library I've found you reading
to me tales out of old books. You
loved those times as much as I ,
didn't you? I never thought I was
keeping you from places you would
rather be. It was just so hard to
be alone and to think we would not
always remain together every mo-
ment of our lives. You were my
only life, Adelaide.

Now walking the hallways of our
house, I think I see your shadow
next to mine there upon the wall.
But how many impossible things
have I already thought real; that
we always lived in eternity; that we
were more than ourselves; that we
could surmount the strangeness
which exists even between twins
such as we; that there were no
secrets dividing us?

But those secrets never estranged
us in this memory-sealed room,
where I can hardly bring myself to
pause in my search for you. Here
you sang tor me in a way that made
me imagine we had both passed
quietly out of life and were no
more than sheer essences harmonis
ing in pools of colour and faded
radiance. Painful now to trudge
through musty rooms and search
the ruddy shadows for your fugi-
tive self, to listen for the tainted
echoes of your pure voice only when

lb / Cry pi of Cthulhu

those beasts momentarily stop ha-
rassing the silence with their demon
whining. But I'll search on . . .
in every horrible room, for that is
what they now are, that is what
you have made them.

I'll search the room from which I
saw you shyly slipping a way one
afternoon, and behind whose door I
saw that chilling dummy, its hands
planted arrogantly on wooden hips
and its head thrown back in a froz-
en burst of laughter. I'll search
the room where once stayed a cer-
tain tutor of yours, whom I never
saw except one night as a mere
shadow in the garden, a shadow
that looked as if it were seeking
the smell and feel of damp earth.
I'll search the room of masks and
mirrors which you didn't think I
knew about. I'll search the room
where the clock you once brought
to our home even now coughs out
its chime with lungs that are not
wholly brazen. I'll search the
room you decorated in red and
black, the room to which you re-
treated periodically to speak pray-
ers which I pray you did not in
tend me to hear as I stood outside
the door. And I'll search the room
about which you denied there was
anything wrong but where I con-
tinued to find—

Oh Adelaide, I'll search all the
rooms that have made this house a
labyrinth of unholy ciphers. But
foremost has it been an infernal
conservatory of blasphemous illumi-
nation— with me its dull pupil! And
you, my classmate, my instructress,
my guide in the ways of estrange-
ment: What is the lesson now?

Where are the tones of your learned
voice? Where—

No, it is not true. That is not

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you, your voice I hear calling from
up there.

Allan, I am here.

Not from your own room, which

was the very first place I searched.

Hurry, Allan, hurry.

Adelaide !

No, you cannot be here. You

cannot be standing behind this

door.

Yes, my brother. Come closer

and welcome your sister on her re-
turn.

Adelaide, your white nightgown;
the blood. Please forgive me, sis-
ter. I cannot even explain to you —
I felt

All alone, I know. And be-
trayed. Lost and lonely Allan. You
were always alone, my brother, and
so was I. It could never have been
otherwise. I know how my lies
have hurt you, and what they drove
you to do. But none of that mat-
ters now, none of that ever mat-
tered, for if we . could not truly
share our lives then at least we al-
ways shared a soul, did we not ?
That is the only thing, despite all
the masks and mirrors and whatever
it was we thought we were. So
many things we could not share un-
til now. Now I can share with you
the most precious thing of all .. .
I will share my death. Come to me
and share my death. Yes, closer.
Do not think about the blood, it is
both of ours. Now even closer.
See how your blood flows with
mine.

Your blood is inside me.

And yours in me. We share a
soul, my brother. We share a soul.

Adelaide.

A llan .

SILENCE.

WRITE FOR LISTING
OF OTHER

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Hallowmas 1 989 / 1 7

18 / Crypt of Cthulhu

GHOST STORIES FOR THE DEAD

By Thomas Ligotti

That faint light in each of us which dates back to before
our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected
if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall
never know why we were separated. -E. M. Cioran

The New Blackness

It isn't like that of an incessant
night, the kind poked into only now
and then by a few abandoned lights
on a lonely street; nor is it like
that of the drab trousers and match-
ing jacket filled out by a stranger
met on such a night. It isn't even
what remains after a tricky wind
snuffs the tiny hysteria of a match-
flame which, on request, is offered
by this stranger. Not like the
shadows creased into the stranger's
face grinning in the flamelight: not
like the sudden emptiness his wea-
pon-weighted hand inflicts. The
double negative night-within-night
of the stranger's car trunk is not
remotely like it.

It is absolutely, when all is con
sidered, not anything like the dim-
ness of the basement where the
stranger detains his first victim,
nor like the blindness with which he
slowly and with regrettable inven-
tion afflicts this victim. Not like it
too is the gloom of an attic where a
second victim, starving for days,
feasts upon decomposing birds,
which the stranger stealthily traps
and laboriously defeathers before
the eyes of his famished victim.
Bound to a chair within the shut-
tered shed behind ruined apart-
ments, a third victim ultimately dis-
covers that twelve dense nights of
radical, though very amateur, sur
gery does not even come close to
it. And other victims, far too
numerous to mention, experience
various shades and types of light-
lessness that are equally unlike the
new blackness of their future.

For the new blackness keeps no
secrets, and the new blackness

touches without pain. In it there
is nothing to know or remember
about who you once might have
been. Which of the stranger's vic-
tims were you? Fortunately such
troubling issues cannot raise them-
selves when there is no one left to
care one way or another. Perhaps
you were even that shabby madman
himself, who saved his worst and
most reliable torments to propel his
own life into the mercies of the new
blackness.

Is he there with you? You with
him?

I am glad I cannot see your
faces .

The N ew Silence

There is no preparation for it.
Even the absence of an expected, a
painfully desired, sound is an ab-
sence of infinitely grosser dimen-
sions. The telephone— keeping stern
vows, its coiled throat in knots —
this supremely indifferent device
and the sound it doesn't make can
merely hint at that higher absence.
Of course such hints are restricted
to certain peak phases of desolation
suffered by certain imaginations,
ones without prayer of defense.
Remember those rooms so stale, so
dim that the dust seems to glitter
with a final crackling luminescence
precedent to ultimate gloom. Why
doesn't that filthy thing ring! What
lunatics people sometimes choose for
their first serious fall into human
affection. Ring, you infernal ma-
chine, unspeaking heart of hell!

Then it does. Remember its
message: tonight in the park, by

the far wall (the one with the stone
heads on it that look like dragons).

Hd mas 1989 / 1 9

and make it late. So the tones of
the tormentor finally get through,
with only minor interference from a
temperamental receiver. But tonight
no spooks within the wires would
interfere with their messages. How
ever, the meeting begins strangely.
Having apparently arrived first, he
huddles in the ample shadows of
the wall with the heads of stone.
Only his voice seems to have kept
the appointment, saying: closer,

come closer. He will not comply
with even the politest request to
move out into the moonlight, no
matter how frightened someone is,
no matter how much someone needs
to be reassured that it's really him
crouching there. For by now any-
one could tell that the voice is a
fantastic imitation, and when the
imposter does finally shake off the
shadows and steps forth, someone
is sorry for ever wanting her poor-
est secret wish granted. And now
every sound seems the maddening
drip of oceans of evil, blasphemy
cooed near the ear of a blood sac-
rifice, a roaring sweat that ulti-
mately evaporates into the sweet
nothing of the new silence.

For in the new silence no voice
deceives you, and in the new si-
lence you cannot hear yourself
weep. All voices are one in the
new silence. You must know now
what it was he did to you and later
to himself. You must now speak to
each other in the language of the
new silence.

So who was he? And who now
are you?

I am glad I cannot hear your
answer .

The Old Nonsense and the New

How serious was the old non
sense? How terrible was it? How
sad? These seem ridiculous ques-
tions now, but at the time never
are. For at just the right moment
they can seize the brain and squeeze
it like something gone soft in the
sun. And even when the sun is at
its height, night may fall; even
when golden light leans over a nice
clean city. Indeed, from the lofty

vantage of a forty-third floor ev
erything looks especially polished-
sterling streets, dazzling semipre-
cious sidewalks, windows locked
diamond-wise into the other big
buildings spreading out there for
miles. What a promising place this
is! Here everything is possible
and nothing otherwise. No likeli-
hood not leading to success, no un-
likelihood linked to catastrophe,
even for the newest comer loitering
two score and three stories above
Terra Incognitaville.

And though this hallway is long
and quiet and empty, there is still
no loneliness. There, look behind,
a door is opening, the one leading
to that supply room. Turn around,
the man sneaking out of that room
doesn't appear as if he has any
business being up here. Then
again, maybe he too is simply intent
on staring out the window and
dreaming about the future. But he
walks right past the window and,
in passing, sends someone crashing
through it with just one good shove
of the shoulder. Forty-three floors
is a long way to fall. And in those
last screaming moments someone
wonders how anyone could be duped
by all this ludicrous glitter, how
anyone could bear confronting the
face of a world that writhes in
darkness without for a moment re-
laxing its blinding and inexcusable
smile. How easily the old nonsense
leads us on and. with neither warn-
ings nor answers, delivers us into
a nonsense that seems so different,
so new.

For the new nonsense promises
no punchlines or apologies, and the
new nonsense peals itself back to
reveal nothing within. No one is
even left to know that nothing is
there. How did you manage to take
leave of that twinkling city without
going anyplace? After you finished
falling, where did you land?

Where are you now? Where did
you go?

I am glad your responses do not
make sense in those dreams I have
of you.

Tales of the New Dream

20 / Crypt of Cthulhu

In the new dream the dead may
not rest very long. Sometimes their
rightful blackness is revoked, de-
served silence foreclosed, their
blissful sense of nothing cut off at
closing time. And now these faithful
patrons of annihilation, loyal cus
tomers of the abyss, these quiet
tenants of paradise are thrown out
on their ear like lowlife riffraff
booted from a respectable establish-
ment. Back down to earth, you
wretches! Having no place else to
spend eternity, they try to make the
best, in other words the worst of it.

Even now Mr. Benedict Griggs,
founding member of the Congenial
Gents, holds the attention of his
fellow clubmen, including the Rev-
erend Penny, with a hair-raising
anecdote from his visit to America:
how he wandered, quite without in-
tention, into that slatternly district
of a large New England city where
the notorious "sad scientist" mur-
ders had occurred; and how this
drunkard, a sornethat lengthy knife
in hand, weaved up to him to ask
assistance and a few helpful direc-
tions home. Home, home. Help me
home! was all the wobbling souse
said. And upon noticing that this
weaver and wobbler had, in fact,
no eyes in his head, Mr. Griggs
credited the spectre with thereupon
vanishing before his own. The en-
tire episode merely "put quite a
scare" into the rather fortunate
Griggs. For others, depend on it,
will have much more put into them!

Others may not be able to tell
their friends, as just have Jamie
Lempkovitch and his girl Lisa Ann
Neff, that they were only grabbed
by a pair of foul maniacs, one male

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and one female, who emerged from
the sod in New Burnstow Park as if
from the gentle surface of a pond.
Others may have to leave behind
more than their shoes and an old
blanket when they make a getaway
from these ravenous revenants, as-
suming anyone at all gets away next
time the hideous couple appear.
Others may not be as lucky!

And parallel to the small-town
fame of the New Burnstow Park
haunting are those metropolitan leg-
ends currently circulating anent an
urban apparition that "flies into its
victim's face," though only on the
darkest downtown nights. And if
this sky-diving shade finds a face
it likes, in other words hates, it
just may decide NOT TO FLY OUT
AGAIN.

For in the new dream such be-
ings— wrenched from eternity and
returned to earth— are capable of
anything from indiscretion to atroc-
ity. Those who have suffered most
know how to inflict it best — it's a
law of the universe. The suicides,
the murdered . . . the unfulfilled,

the broken hearted : veterans of

extraordinary suffering and merce-
naries of its perpetuation.

These are my mind's eyes, I who
have no eyes. These are my mind's
mind, I who am not mind. I am
bereft of traits, bankrupt of quali-
ties. The riches of the dead are
extravagant next to my destitute
estate. I have nothing but my
immortality; and now, desiring or
not, they will have it too.

And I am glad I cannot know
them.

But I am even gladder they can-
not know me.

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Hallowmas 1989 / 21

STUDIES IN HORROR

By Thomas Ligotti

TRANSCFNDENT HORROR

Those bells ringing on the mist-
covered mountain signify that the
Master of the Temple is dead. The
fact of the matter is that the monks
there finally killed him.

It seems that a few years ago
the Master of the Temple began to
exhibit some odd and very unpleas
ant forms of behavior. He appar-
ently lost all sense of earthly de-
corum, even losing control over his
own body. Once an extra head
sprouted from the side of the Mas-
ter's neck, and this ugly little
thing started to issue all sorts of
commands and instructions to the
monks which only their lofty sense
of decency and order prevented
them from carrying out. Eventually
the Master of the Temple was con
fined to a small room in an isolated
part of the monastery. There, this
once-wise and beloved teacher was
looked after like an animal. For
several years the monks put up
with the noises he made, the divers
shapes he took. Finally, they
killed him.

It is whispered among students
of enlightenment that one may
achieve a state of being in which
enlightenment itself loses all mean-
ing, with the consequence that one
thereby becomes subject to all man-
ner of strange destinies.

And the monks? After the as-
sassination, they scattered in all
directions. Some hid out in other
monasteries, while others went back
to live among the everyday inhabi-
tants of this earth. But it wasn't
as if they could escape their past
by fleeing it, no more than they
could rid themselves of their old
master by killing him.

For even after the death of his
material self, the Master of the
Temple sought out those who were
once under his guidance; and upon
these unhappy students he now be-

stowed, somewhat insistently, his
terrible illumination.

GOTHIC HORROR

The room in the tower seemed to
have closed in upon him while he
slept, so fie measured it off again
and found its dimensions to be un-
changed. His mind still uneasy, he
measured it a second time, and then
a third. Then he awoke and mea-
sured it off a fourth time in the
room in the tower. "I am measur-
ing my own coffin," he whispered
to himself while staring intently at
the splotched stones of the floor.

Once again he examined every
bare corner of his cell. Then he
wandered over to the low, handle
less door— shaped like an arch — and,
laying his cheek against the heavy,
splintered wood, he squinted through
the tiny openings in the iron grill,
surveying the circular corridor of
the tower. First he gazed in one
direction and then, shifting over
to the opposite side of the grill,
in the other. Both directions of-
fered the same view: cell door af-

ter cell door, each with an armed
guard beside it. each progressively
shrinking in the circular perspec-
tive of the corridor. It was the
uppermost level of the castle's high-
est tower, a quiet place when all
the prisoners were at rest. Then a
tight lipped moan broke the silence,
waking him a second time from a
second sleep. He measured off the
dimensions of his cell once more,
examining every bare corner, then
surveyed the circular corridor
through the tiny openings of the
iron grill.

Once again he wandered over to
the arch-shaped window of his pris-
on cell. This aperture, the only
means of escape aside from the low
door, was constructed to include
four pairs of sharp metal spikes:
two pairs projecting from the right

2 2 / Crypt of C.thuthu

and left sides, two closing it from
its top and bottom, and all forming
a kind of cross whose parts did not
quite join together. But these
pointed impediments notwithstand-
ing, there remained a perilous de-
scent groundward. No means for
securing either grip or foothold
crucial for such a climb were of-
fered by the castle's outer walls,
nor was there any possibility of
concealment, even, one might say
especially, during the darkest of
the castle's watchful nights. Be-
yond the window was a loftly view
of sunlit mountains, blue sky, rust-
ling forest, a seemingly endless
tableau of nature which in other
circumstances might have been con
sidered sublime. In the present
circumstances, the mountains and
forests, perhaps the sky itself,
seemed populated with human ene-
mies and natural obstacles which
made the mere dream of escape an
impossibility .

Someone was now shaking him,
and he awoke. It was the dead of
night. Outside the window a bright
crescent moon was fixed in the

blackness. Within the room were
two guards and a hooded figure
holding a lamp. One of the guards
pinned the dreamer to the floor,
while the other reached underneath
his ragged shirt, relieving him of a
hidden weapon he had recently

formed out of a fragment from one
of the stone walls in the tower

room. "Don't worry," the guard

said, "we've been watching you."
Then the hooded figure waved the
lamp toward the doorway and the
prisoner was carried out, his feet
dragging over the dark stones of
the floor.

From the room in the tower they
descended— by means of countless
stone staircases and long, torchlit
passages— to the deepest part of
the castle far underground. This
area was a complex of vast cham-
bers, each outfitted from its cold,
earthen floor to its lofty, almost
indiscernible ceiling witfi a formid-
able array of devices. In addition
to the incessant echoes of an icy
seepage dripping from above, the

only other distinguishable sound
was the creaking of this incredible
system of machinery, with the re-
frain now and then of an open-
mouthed groan.

His body was put in harness and
hoisted so that the tips of his toes
barely grazed the floor. The hooded
figure, through a sequence of sig-
nals, directed the proceedings.
During a lull in his agony, the
prisoner once again tried to ex-
plain to his persecutors their error
- that he was not who they thought
he was, that he was suffering an
other man's punishment.

"Are you certain of that?" asked
the hooded figure, speaking in an
almost kindly tone of voice which he
had never used before.

At these words, a look of pro-
found confusion appeared on the
prisoner's face, one quite distinct
from previous expressions of mere
physical torment. And although no
new manipulations had been em
ployed, his entire body became gro
tesquely arched in agony as he
emitted a single unbroken scream
before collapsing into unconscious-
ness .

"Waken him," ordered the hooded
figure .

They tried, but 1 his body still
hung motionless from the ropes,
hunched and twisting in its har
ness. He had already been re-
vived for the last time, and his
dreants of measurements and pre-
cise dimensions would no longer be
disturbed, lost as they now were in
a formless nonsense of nothingness.

EXOTIC HORROR

He had lost his guide— or else
had been abandoned by this seeth-
ing, wiry native of the city— and
now he was wandering through
strange streets alone. The expe
rience was not entirely an unwel-
come one. From the first instant
he became aware of the separation,
things became more . . . interest-
ing. Perhaps ttiis transformation
had begun even in the moments
preceding a full awareness of his
situation: the narrow entranceway

Hallowmas 1989 / 23

of a certain street or the shadowed
spires of a certain structure ap-
peared as mildly menacing to the
prophetic edges of his vision, pleas
antly threatening. Now his full
vision was of an infinitely more
wary scene, and a truly foreign
one.

It was near sundown and all the
higher architectures — the oddly
curving roofs, the almost tilting
peaks — were turned into anonymous
forms with razor-sharp outlines by
the low brilliance in the west. And
these angular monuments, blocking
the sun, covered the streets below
with a thick layer of shadows, so
that, even though a radiant blue
sky continued to burn above, down
here it was already evening.

The torpid confusion of the
streets, the crudely musical clatter
of alien sounds, became far more
mysterious without the daylight and
without his guide. It was as if the
city had annexed the shadows and
expanded under the cover of dark-
ness, as if it were celebrating in-
credible things there, all sorts of
fabulous attractions. Golden lights
began to fill windows and to fall
against the crumbling mortar of old
walls .

His attention was now drawn to
a low building at the end of the
street, and. avoiding any thought
which might diminish his sense of
freedom, he entered its lamplit
doorway .

The place was one of indefinite
character and intention. Stepping
inside, he received a not unwelcom
ing glance from a man who was
adjusting some objects on a shelf
across the room, and who turned
briefly to look over his shoulder at
the foreign visitor. At first this
man, who must have been the pro-
prietor, was barely noticeable, for
the color and texture of his attire
somehow caused him to blend, cha-
meleon-like, into the surrounding
decor. The man became apparent
only after showing his face, but af-
ter he turned away he retreated
back into the anonymity from which
tie had been momentarily summoned
by the intrusion of a customer.

Otherwise there was no one else in
the shop, and, left unbothered by
its invisible proprietor, he browsed
freely among the shelves.

And what merchandise they held.
True curiosities in a thousand twist-
ing shapes were huddled together
on the lower shelves, met one's
gaze at eye level, and leered down
from dim and dusty heights. Some
of them, particularly the very small
ones, but also the very largest
ones crouched in corners, could
not be linked to anything he had
ever seen. They might have been
trinkets for strange gods, toys for
monsters. His sense of freedom in-
tensified. Now he was nearly over-
come with the feeling that something
unheard of could very possibly
enter his life, something which
otherwise might have passed him
by. His sensation was one of fear,
but fear that was charged with the
blackest passion. He now felt him-
self as the victim of some vast con-
spiracy that involved the remotest
quarters of the cosmos, countless
plots all converging upon him.
Hidden portents were everywhere
and his head was now spinning:
first with vague images and possi-
bilities, then with . . . darkness.

What place he later occupied is
impossible to say. Underground,
perhaps, beneath the shop with the
peculiar merchandise. Thencefor-
ward it was always dark, except on
those occasions when his keepers
would come down and shine a light
across the full length of his mon-
strous form. ( The vi ctim of a hor -
rible magic . the guide would whis-
per.) But the shining light never
disturbed his dreams, since his
present shape was equipped with
nothing that functioned as eyes.

Afterward money would be col-
lected from the visiting spectators,
who were sworn to secrecy before
they were allowed to witness this
marvel. Still later they would be
assassinated to insure the inviolable
condition of their vow. But how
much more fortunate were they,
meeting their deaths with a fresh
sense of that exotic wonder which
they had travelled so far to expe

24 / Crypt ol Cthulhu

rience, than he, for whom all dis
tances and alien charm had long ago
ceased to exist in the cramped and
nameless incarceration in which he
had found a horrible home.

SPECTRAL HORROR

One may be alone in the house
and yet not alone.

There are so many rooms, so
many galleries and corridors, all
laid out level upon level, a strange
succession of mysteries, so many
places where a peculiar quiet re-
sounds with secrets. Every object
and surface of the house seems
darkly vibrant, a medium for dis-
tant agitations which are felt but
not always seen or heard: dusty

chandeliers send a stirring through
the air above, walls ripple within
patterns of raised filigree, grimy
portraits shudder inside their gilded
frames. And even if the light
throughout much of the house has
grown stale and become a sepia
haze, it nevertheless remains a haze
in ferment, a fidgeting aura that
envelops this museum of tremulous
antiquities .

So one cannot feel alone in such
a house, especially when it is a re-
mote edifice which clings to the
very edge of the land and hovers
above a frigid ocean. Through an
upper window is a view of coastal
earth falling away into gray, heav-
ing waters. The lower windows of
the house all look into the rustling
depths of a garden long overgrown
and sprouting in prolific tangles.
A narrow path leads through this
chaotic luxuriance, ending at t fie
border of a dense wood which is
aroused to life by a mild but per-
petual wind. Ocean, garden, woods
—surroundings possessed by a vis-
ible turbulence which echoes the
unseen tremors within the house
itself. And when night masks the
movements of this landscape, it is
the stars that shiver around a
livid, palpitant moon.

Yet one may not believe there is
an exchange of influence between
the house and the world around it.
And still there is a presence that

pervades each as though there were
no walls to divide them.

From the moment one arrives at
such a house there seems to be
something moving in the background
of its scenes, a hidden company
whose nature is unknown. No true
peace can establish itself in these
rooms, however long they have re-
mained alone with their own empti-
ness, abandoned to lie dormant and
dreamless. Throughout the most
innocent mornings and unclouded
afternoons there endures a kind of
restless pulling at appearances, an
awkward or expert fussing with the
facade of objects. In the night a
tide of shadows invades the house,
submerging its rooms in a darkness
which allows a greater freedom to
these fitful maneuverings .

And perhaps there is a certain
room toward the very summit of the
house, a room where one may sense
how deeply the house has pene-
trated into a far greater estate: a

landscape which is without bounda-
ries either above or below, an in-
finite architecture whose interior is
as tortuous and vast as its exterior.
The room is long and large and
features a row of double doors
along the full length of one wall,
doors which lead out to a narrow
terrace overlooking the ocean and
staring straight into the sky. And
each door is composed of a double
row of windowpanes, opening the
room to the images of the expansive
world outside it and allowing the
least possible division between them.

There are no working light fix-
tures in this room, so that it nec-
essarily shares in the luminous
moods of the day or night beyond
the windows. Discovering this
chamber on a certain overcast af-
ternoon, one settles into an apart-
ment that itself is hung with clouds
and enveloped by dull twilight for
endless hours. And yet the room
appears to gain all the depth that
the day has lost: whereas the sky

has been foreshortened by a low
ceiling of soft gray clouds, the dim
corners and shaded furnishings
reach into immense realms, great

Hallowmas 1989 / 25

wells and hollows beyond vision.
Certainly the echoes one hears must
be resonating in places outside that
room, which muffles one's move-
ments with its thick and densely
figured carpet, its plumply uphol
stered chairs, and its maze of ta-
bles, cases, and cabinets in dark,
weighty wood.

For in this constricted setting,
echoes emerge which only a void of
supernatural dimensions could cre-
ate. Yet at first they may sound
like the reverberant groaning of
those clouds in which a storm slum-
bers. And then they may seem to
mimic the hissing of the ocean as it
swirls about the broken land below.
Slowly, however, ttie echoes dis-
tinguish themselves from these
natural sounds and attain their own
voice: a voice that carries across

incredible distances, a voice whose
words come to lose their stratum of
sense, a voice that is dissolving in
to sighs and sobs and chattering
insanity. Every niche, every pat-
tern, every shadow of the room is
eloquent with this voice. And one's
attention may be distracted by this
strange soliloquy, this uncanny
music. Thus, one may not notice,
as afternoon approaches nightfall,
that something else is present in
the room, something which has been
secreted out of sight and waits to
rise up in the shape of a revela-
tion, to rise up like a cry in one's
own throat.

Such phenomena may be quite
severe in their effects, leaving their
witness in a perilous orientation be-
tween two worlds, one of which is
imposing its madness and its mys-
teries on the other. We feel the
proximity of a great darkness be-
yond earthly reason, of a cryptic
land of dreams whose shadows min-
gle with our own, breathing their
intense life into the airless world of
the mundane. For a time we are
content to reside within that meta-
physical twilight and delve deep in-
to its hues. Long exasperated by
questions without answers, by an-
swers without consequences, by
truths which change nothing, we

learn to become intoxicated by the
mood of mystery itself, by the odor
of the unknown. We are entranced
by the subtle scents and wavering
reflections of the unimaginable.

In the beginning it is not our
intention to seek order within mad-
ness or to give a name to certain
mysteries. We are not concerned
with creating a system out of the
strangeness of that house. What we
seek — in all its primitive purity — is
the company of the spectral. But
ultimately, as if possessed by some
fatal instinct, we succumb to the
spirit of intrigue and attempt to
find a drab focus for the amorphous
glories we have inherited.

We are like the man who, by
some legacy of fate, has come to
stay in another old house, one very
much like our own. After passing
a short time within the cavernous
and elaborate solitude of the place,
he becomes a spectator to strange
sights and sounds. He then begins
to doubt his sanity, and at last
flees the advancing shadows of the
tiouse for the bright shelter of a
nearby town. There, amid the
good society of the local citizens,
he learns the full history of the
house. (It seems that long ago
some tragedy occurred, an irrepa
rable melodrama that has continued
to be staged many years after the
deaths of the actors involved.)
Others who have lived in the house
have witnessed the same eerie
events, and its most recent guest
is greatly relieved by this knowl-
edge. Faith in his mental sound
ness has been triumphantly re-
stored: it is the house itself which

is mad.

But this man need not have been
so comforted. If the spectral drama
could be traced to definite origins,
and others have been audience to
it. this is not to prove that all
testimony regarding the house is
unmarked by madness. Rather, it
suggests a greater derangement, a
conspiracy of unreason implicating
a plurality of lunatics, a delirium
that encompasses past and present,
houses and minds, the claustral
cellars of the soul and the endless

2b / Crypt of Cthulhu

spaces outside it.

Tor we are the specters of a
madness that surpasses ourselves
and hides in mystery. And though
we search for sense throughout
endless rooms, all we may find is a
voice whispering from a mirror in a
house that belongs to no one.

UNREAL HORROR

One must speak of the imposter
city.

There is never a design to ar-
rive in this place. Destination is
always elsewhere. Only when this
destination is reached too soon, or
by means of a strange route, may
suspicions arise. Then everything
requires a doubting gaze.

Yet everything also seems above
sensible question. On the occasion
that one has set out for a great
metropolis, here the very site of
anticipation is found. Its monu
ments spread wondrously across
bright skies, despite an unseason-
able mist which may obscure its
earthward landmarks.

But here, one soon observes,
nightfall is out of pace. Perhaps it
will occur unexpectedly early, bring-
ing a darkness of an unfamiliar
quality and duration. Throughout
these smothering hours there may
be sounds that press strangely
upon the fringes of sleep.

The following day belongs for-
ever to a dim season. And all the
towers of the great metropolis have
withered in a mist which now lies
upon low buildings and has drawn a
pale curtain across the sky.

Through the inist, which hovers
thick and stagnant, the city pro
jects the features of its true face.
Drab, crumpled buildings appear
along streets which twist without
pattern like cracks between the
pieces of a puzzle. Dark houses
bulge; neither stone nor wood,
their surface might be of decaying
flesh, breaking away at the slight-
est touch.

Some of these structures are
mere facades propped up by a void.
Others falsify their interiors with
crude scenes painted where windows

should be. And where a true win-
dow appears, there is likely to be
an arm hanging out of it, a stuffed
and dangling arm with a hand whose
fingers are too many or too few.

Here and there scraps of debris
hop about with no wind to guide
them. These are the only things
that seem to move in these streets,
though there is a constant scraping
noise that follows one's steps. If
one pauses for a moment to look in-
to a narrow space between build-
ings, something may be seen drag-
ging itself along the ground, or
perhaps it has already laid itself
across the street, obstructing the
way that leads out of the city. This
figure is only that of a dead-eyed
dummy; yet, when someone tries to
step over the thing, its mouth sud-
denly drops open. At the time this
is the best the city can do— a sham
of menace that has no life and de-
ceives no one.

Only later— when, in disgust,
one has left behind this place of
feeble impostures -will the true
menace make itself known. And it
begins when familiar surroundings
inspire, on occasion, moments of
doubt. Then places must verify
themselves, objects are asked to
prove their solidity, a searching
hand makes inquiries upon the sur-
face of a window.

Afterward there are intense
seizures of suspicion that will not
abate. Everything seems to be on
the verge of disclosing its unreality
and drifting off into the shadows.
And the shadows themselves col-
lapse and slide down rooftops,
trickle down walls and into the
streets like black rain. One's own
eyes stare absently in the mirror;
one's mouth drops open in horror.

DEMONIC HORROR

And even in the darkness they
seemed to linger, half tone freaks
parading translucent until they
faded with the dawn. Eyes open or
closed, the lamp glowing or not, he
felt that they were threatening to
pass over the threshold and mani-
fest themselves on the other side of

Hallowmas 1989 / 2/

sleep. Their faces would begin to
darken the air, and then dissolve.
The light in his room momentarily
molded itself into fantastic limbs
that slipped in and out of the glare
of his eyeglasses. A draft grew
thick and foul, gusting briefly
against his cheek.

And in the morning he drifted
pale from his home, another night
exacted from him by disfigured
masters, a little more of himself
sliding into the black mirror of
dreams .

And at first he would regain

some of his losses of the previous
night, but less of his own life was
being returned to his possession.
Their presence was now with him,
an invisible mist surrounding him
and distorting his senses. The
streets he walked seemed to slant
beneath his feet; a scene in the

distance would be twisted out of all
earthly shape, suggesting the re-
mote latitudes of nightmare. Voices
whispered to him from the depths
of vertiginous stairwells and the far
corners of long narrowing hallways.
Somehow the ravelling clouds car-
ried a charnel odor which pursued
him back to the door of his home
and into his sleep.

And into the dreams he fell,
helplessly skittering down slanted

streets, tumbling down stairwells,
caught in a mesh of moldering

clouds. Then the faces began to
float above him, sharp fingers reach-
ing into his flesh. He screamed
himself awake. But even in the
darkness they seemed to linger.

And finally he was chased from
his home and into the streets, walk-
ing ceaselessly until daybreak. He
became a seeker of crowds, but the
crowds thinned and abandoned him.
He became a seeker of lights, but
the lights grew strange and led him
into desolate places.

And now the lights were re-
flected in the black, shining sur-
face of wetted streets. Every house
in that neighborhood was a bat-
tered, cracking vessel of darkness;
every tree was perfect stillness.
There was not another soul to com-
panion him, and the moon was a

fool .

And they were there with him.
He could feel their scabby touch,
though he could not see them. As
long as he walked, as long as he
was awake, he would not see them.
But someone was pulling at his
sleeve, a frail little man with eye-
glasses .

It was only an elderly gentleman
who wanted to be shown the way
along these dim streets, to ex-
change a few remarks with this
grateful stranger, one so eager for
company on that particular evening.
Finally the soft-voiced old man
tipped his hat and continued slowly
down the street. But he had walked
only a few steps when he turned
and said: "Do you like your demon

dreams?"

And into the dreams he fell . .

. and forever.

MACABRE HORROR

To others he always tried to
convey the impression that he lived
in a better place than he actually
did, one far more comfortable and
far less decayed. "If they could
only see what things are really like,
rotting all around me."

Feeling somewhat morose, he
closed his eyes and sank down into
gloomy reflections. He was sitting
in a plump, stuffed chair which was
sprouting in several places through
the worti upholstery.

"Would you like to know how it
feels to be dead?" he imagined a
voice asking him.

"Yes, I would," he imagined an-
swering .

A rickety but rather proud look-
ing gentleman — this is how he imag-
ined the voice led him past the
graveyard gates. (And they were
flaking with age and squeaked in
the wind, just as he always imag-
ined they would.) The quaintly
tilting headstones, the surrounding
grove of vaguely stirring trees,
the soft gray sky overhead, the
cool air faintly fragrant with decay:
"Is this how it is?" he asked hope-
fully. "I.ate afternoon in a perpet-
ual autumn?"

28 / Crypt of Cthulhu

"Not exactly." the gentleman
answered. "Please keep watching."

The gentleman's instruction was
intended ironically, for now there
was no longer anything to behold:
no headstones, no trees or sky,
nor was there a fragrance of any
kind to be blindly sensed.

"Is this how it is, then?" he
asked once more. "A body frozen
in blackness, a perpetual night in
winter?"

"Not precisely," the gentleman
replied. "Allow your vision to be-
come used to the darkness."

Then it began to appear to him,
glowing with a glacial illumination, a
subterranean or extrastellar phos
phorescence. Initially, the radiant
corpse he saw seemed to be in a
stiffly upright position; but he had
no way of calculating his angle of
perspective, which may actually
have been somewhere directly above
the full length of the body, rather
than frontally facing its height. No

less than its mold-spotted clothes,

the flesh of the cadaver was in

gauzy tatters, lips shrivelled to a
powdery smudge on a pale shroud
of a face, eyes dried up in the
shells of their sockets, hair a mere
sprinkling of dust. And now he

imagined the feeling of death as one
previously beyond his imagination.
This feeling was simply that of an
eternally prolonged itching sensa-
tion .

"Yes, of course," he thought,
"this is how it really must be, an
incredible itch when all the fluids
are gone and ragged flesh chafes in
ragged clothes. A terrible itching
and nothing else, nothing worse."
Then, out loud, tie asked the old
gentleman: "Is this, then, how it

truly feels to be dead 7 Only this
and not the altogether unimaginable
horror I've always feared it would
be?"

"Is that what you would now
have, this true knowledge?" asked
a voice, though it was not the
voice of the rickety and proud
looking old man he had first imag-
ined. This was another voice alto-
gether, a strange voice which prom-
ised: "Then the true knowledge

shall be yours."

A long time passed before his
body was found, its bony fingers
digging into the tattered material of
a plump, stuffed armchair, its skin
already crumbling and covered with
the room's dust. His discoverers
were some acquaintances who won-
dered what had become of him. And
as they stood for a few numbed
moments around the site of his
seated corpse, a few of them ab-
sent-mindedly gave their collared
necks or shirt-sleeved arms a little
scratch .

Along with the trauma this un-
expected discovery imposed, there
was the lesser shock of the dead
man's run-down home, which was
not at all the place his acquaint-
ances imagined they would find.
But somehow it continued to be the
better place of their imagination
when— on autumn afternoons or
winter nights— they recollected the
thing they found in the chair, or
simply reflected on the phenomenon
of death itself. Often these mus-
ings would be accompanied by a
tiny scratch or two just behind the
ears or at the base of the neck.

PUPPET HORROR

l

The one sitting all cock eyed
was telling me things. Of course
its soft and carefully sewn mouth
was not moving, none of their
mouths move unless I make them.
Nonetheless I can still understand
them when they have something to
say. which is actually quite often.
They have lived through things no
one would believe.

And they are all over my room.
This one is on the floor, lying flat
on its little stomach with its head
propped within the crux of its two
hands, a tiny foot waving in the
air behind. That one is lazily
sprawled high upon an empty shelf,
leaning on its elbow, a thin leg of
cloth peaked like a triangle. They
are everywhere else too: in the

fireplace that I would never light;
in my most comfortable chair which
they make seem gigantic; even un-
der my bed, a great many of them.

Hallowmas 1989 / 29

as well as in it. I usually occupy
a small stool in the middle of the
room, and the room is always quiet.
Otherwise it would be difficult to
hear their voices, which are faint
and slightly hoarse, as might be
expected from such throats as
theirs.

Who else would listen to them
and express what they have been
through? Who else could under-
stand their fears, however petty
they may seem at times? To a cer-
tain degree, then, they are de-
pendent on me. Patiently I attend
to histories and anecdotes of exis-
tences beyond the comprehension of
most. Never, I believe, have I
given them reason to feel that the
subtlest fluctuations of their anxi-
eties, the least nuance of their
cares, have not been accounted for
by me and given sympathetic con-
sideration.

Do I ever speak to them of my
own life? No; that is, not since a
certain incident which occurred
some time ago. To this day I don't
know what came over me. Absent-
mindedly I began confessing some
trivial worry, I've completely for-
gotten what. And at that moment
all their voices suddenly stopped,
every one of them, leaving an in-
sufferable vacuum of silence.

Eventually they began speaking
to me again, and all was as it had
been before. But I shall never
forget that interim of terrible si-
lence, just as I shall never forget
the expression of infinite evil on
their faces which rendered me
speechless thereafter.

They, of course, continue to
talk on and on . . . from ledge
and shelf, floor and chair, from
under the bed and in it.

PREHISTORIC HORROR

I cannot imagine how this voice
invaded the dream, yet did not be-
long to it.

“0 intelligent life of a fool's
future," it said, "hear this song.
If only you could gaze with me from
this mere rock, this dull slab which
is yet a throne to roiling seas and

to the mist which veils a rustling
paradise. And beneath those churn-
ing waters — the slow fierce music of
a dim world of monsters, deep eyes
ever-searching. And upon the un-
patterned lands— chaotic undulations
amidst vines and greenish vapor,
the flickering dance of innumerable
tails and tongues. And above in
the skies smeared over with ashen
clouds— leathery wings flapping. O
fallen beast, if only you could see
all this through my lidless eyes,
this sacred world innocent of hope
how willingly you would then follow
the death of all your empty dreams."

"Innocent of hope, perhaps," I
thought upon waking in the dark-
ness. "And yet, O wide-eyed liz-
ard, I would hear you sing some-
thing of your pain and your panic.
A paradise of prehistory, indeed.
How finely spoken. But a lyric of
life all the same— of slime itself, of
ooze as such.

"I scorn your eloquence and your
world, the poetry of a living obliv
ion, and now seek a simpler style
of annihilation. My hopes remain
intact. Your split-tongued words
were merely a boorish intrusion on
a dream of much deeper things — the
Incomparably Remote.

"And now let me close my eyes
once again to follow in dreams the
backward path far beyond aM^ noise
and numbers, falling into that world
where I am the brother of silence
and share a single face with the
void . "

But the reptile's voice continues
to mock me, night after night.

And it will laugh and rave
throughout all the humid nights of
history. Until that perfect lid of
darkness falls over this world once
more .

NAMELESS HORROR

The place was an old studio. To
him it seemed abandoned, yet who
knows? Certainly nothing there was
in its place— not the broken odds
and ends lying about, not the scat-
tered papers, not even the dust.
The panes of the skylight were
caked with it. Yet who can be

30 t Crypt of Cthulhu

sure? Perhaps there was some im
perceptible interval between occu
pation and abandonment, some fine
phase of things which he was sim-
ply unable to detect at the moment.
He stooped and picked up a few of
the wrinkled papers, which ap-
peared to be drawings. Now a
little rain began drooling down the
panes of the skylight.

The drawings. He shuffled a
stack of them page after page be-
fore his eyes. So intricate, every-

thing

in

them

was

made of

tiny ,

tiny

hairs or

little

veins ,

insect

veins

There

were shapes:

he

could

not

tell

what

they were

sup-

posed

to

be ,

but something

about

the

shape of

the

shapes ,

their

twistings and the way they flared
around, was so horrible. A little
rain seeped in through some fine
cracks in the windowpanes above;
it dripped down and made strange
marks on the dusty floor of the old
studio.

Someone was coming up the stairs
outside the door of the studio. So
he hid behind that door, and, when
that someone came in, he, without
looking back, went out. Tip-toeing
down the stairs, running down the
street in the rain.

He was walking now, and the
rain was sluicing vigorously in the
gutters. And something else that
he saw was in there too. It looked
like the tail of an animal, but a
very intricate tail. It was being
dragged slowly along by the run-off
in the gutter, and it made weird
wriggling movements. When it was
farther away, the intricacies of the
object — those involved patterns in
which he thought he saw a face
smiling so peacefully — were no long-
er discernible, and he felt relieved.

But the rain was coming down
even harder now, so he retreated
into a shelter along the street. It
was just a little room with a wooden
bench, open on one side and rain
running off its roof, long watery
ropes of rain that were swinging a
little in the wind. Very damp in
there, and the frayed edges of
shadows waving on the three walls.
Damp smell, with something else too.

some unsavory enigma about the
place, something in its very out-
lines. its contours. What was it
that happened in here, and could
that be a little blood over there 7

The bench where he had sat
down was now gleaming with damp-
ness under moonlight. At the other
end, almost entirely absorbed into
the dark little corner, was a bent
figure, almost folded in half. It
groaned and moved a little. Finally
it straightened up, and its intri-
cately tangled hair came tumbling
down into the moonlight. Along
the slick bench it slid, dragging
itself and its rags slowly to his
side. He, on the other hand, could
not move an inch, not a hair.

Then, from somewhere within all
that intricacy, a pair of eyes opened,
and a pair of lips. And they said
to him: "Let me tell you what my

name is."

But when the figure leaned over,
smiling so placidly, those shapeless
lips had to whisper their words into
the cold damp ear of a corpse.

NIGHTMARE HORROR

No one knows how entrance is
made; no one recalls by what route
such scenes are Arrived at. There
might be a soft tunnel of blackness,
possibly one without arching walls
or solid flooring, a vague stream-
lined enclosure down which one
floats toward a shadowy terminus.
Then suddenly, unexpectedly, a
light flares up and spreads, props
appear all around, the scenario is
laid out and learned in an instant,
while that ingress of blackness—
that dull old tunnel — is unmemorized.
On the other hand, perhaps there
is no front door to the dream, no
first act to the drama: a gallery of
mannikins abruptly wakes and they
all take up their roles in mid-
speech, without a beginning to go
back to.

But the significant thing is not
to begin but to continue, not to ar-
rive but to stay. This is the found-
ing condition, the one on which all
others are grounded and raised:
restriction, incarceration are the

Hallowmas 1989 / 31

laws of the structure. And this
structure, an actual buildiny now,
is a strange one; complete in itself,
it is not known to be part of a
larger landscape, as if perfectly
painted mountains had been left
without a lake or sky on a wide
white canvass. Is it a hospital?

Museum? Drab labyrinth of offices?
Or just some nameless . . . institu-
tion? Whatever it may be outside,
inside — for those who have impor-
tant business there— it is very late,
and the time has somehow slipped
by for a crucial appointment.

In which room was it supposed
to take place? Is this even the

right section of the building, the
correct floor? All the hallways look
the same— without proper lighting or
helpful passersby— and none of the
rooms is numbered. But numbers
are of no assistance, going from
empty room to empty room is futile.
That vital meeting has already been
missed and nothing in the world
can make up for this loss.

Finally, a kind of climax is
reached in the shadows beneath a
stairway, where one has taken ref
uge from the consequences of fail-
ure.

And within this apparent haven
there is an entirely new develop-
ment: multitudes of huge spiders

hang in drooping webs above and
around you. Your presence has
disturbed them and they begin to
move, their unusual bodies maneu-
vering about. But however horrible
they may be, you know that you
need them.

Tor they are the ones who show
you the way out; it is their touch
which guides you and reminds you
of how to take leave of this torture.
Everyone recalls this final flight
from the nightmare; everyone knows
how to scream.

OCCULT HORROR

Gruesome fate.

And five candles burned the
whole time, at the five points of
the star. They never went out.
The man in the middle was tall, his
forehead taut. His shirt was once

white but had yellowed to reflect
the moon in the dark sky above the
twisted trees outside the window.
Inside there was only that great
empty room with the single star,
the five candles, and the man.

Also there was the book, which
the man knelt to read at the center
of the star. Book of t he D amne d.
And it told of other worlds, and
the man summoned them. He had
visions, visions in the smoke of the
candles, in the light of the moon
which shone on the dull dark floor
of the room. I he patterns on the
walls swirled in the candlelight and
in the moonlight.

Worlds bloomed and withered,
spun and stopped, flourished and
decayed. In the smoke of the can-
dles. But they were all the same.
All of them had different colors,
just as the one he knew, and dif-
ferent seasons: each beat like a

hunted heart.

"No more blood," he cried, chok
ing. "These worlds merely mimic
my own." And again: "No more

blood ! "

The candles, the moon, the pat-
terns on the wall, and the howling
wind heard; and all agreed to wel-
come him to this other world, which
was already theirs.

Now it would be his.

And the flames barely fluttered
as he collapsed into the star, his
face so white above his yellow shirt
and beneath the yellow moon. A
beautiful, bloodless white.

How foolish they were who
thought he was dead: who buried

him in that sticky earth, so moist
and warm in summer. And dark as
blood .

DREAMWORLD HORROR

Illusions struggle with illusions.

And in the expansive silence of
that landscape nothing is settled or
certain, not excepting the image of
infinity presented by the stars and
blackness that seem to spread im-
mensely above. For below, one may
vow, extends another blackness, an
endless ebony plateau whose surface
is like polished stone. There the

32 / Crypl of Cthulhu

sky would appear to have thrown
down stars, setting them within the
shining darkness of the lower world
so that it might contemplate from afar
these glittering relics, scintillant
cast-offs from its ancient treasure,
the brilliant debris of its dreams.

Thus, both above and below one
may see the flickering of these
luminous motes, quivering bodies
held captive in the unbroken web
of blackness. And the abysmal web
itself seems to tremble; for nothing
there is at peace or secure in its
nature. Even the emptiness that
separates the starlight from its re-
flection upon the great glassy plain
is an imitation void. For. having
made the level land its mirror, the
sky has gazed too long and too
deeply, reaching into itself and em-
bracing its own visions, saturating
the distance between the thing and
its simulacrum. All space is vir-
tual; the infinite is illusory. There,
iri that landscape, a dimension has
died, annihilating depth and leaving
behind only a lustrous image which
seems to float far and wide upon
the infinite surface of a black ocean.

And it is said that this ocean is
itself merely a starry phantasm
glimpsed in certain eyes . . . eyes
that may be seen as one wanders
the streets of strange cities . . .

eyes that are like two stars laid
deep in a black mirror.

NIHILISTIC HORROR

After tabulating our number of
days on this earth, we would still
have to multiply this sum several
times in order to take into account
our dreams— those days inside our
nights. Several more lifetimes must
therefore be added, including those
in which the dead continue to live
and those in which the living are
dead; those in which such trivial
occurrences as an innocent laugh
acquire a profound meaning and
those in which the most awesome
events have none at all; those which
are made very strange by super-
natural powers and those in which
magic itself seems commonplace;
those in which we play ourselves

and those in which we seem to be
someone else; those in which every-
thing appears frightening and harm-
ful and those in which indifference
is the single note that sounds
through the dream.

These contradictions make our
dreams seem negligible, and this is
what enables them to be ignored in
the tabulation of our days.

But there are still those dreams
which are waiting for others to
come along, whose terms and con-
ditions will cancel them out. These
are the leftover dreams, our dark
days, which have yet to fall victim
to mathematics, and they are the
only ones that count for anything.
And it is the same with our waking
days. Only a few of those escape
nullification by contradiction, that
process of cancellation which is go-
ing on all the time.

In any case, neither dreams nor
days ever survive long before their
counterparts step up and annihilate
them. It is quite possible that, in
our last moments, there will be
nothing left which we might look
back on as a lifetime.

But will this nothingness itself
endure, or will it too be cancelled
out by some inviolable and unsus-
pected form of bding, terminating
at last in a kind of double oblivion?

ORDER OE ILLUSION (from p. 34)

he saw the gyration of shadows up-
on the summit of the hills. How could
they persist in their madness, he
wondered. Nevertheless, for reasons
beyond explanation, he joined them.

And they welcomed him, for they
could see the ordeals he had under-
gone, the powers he had gained. He,
on the other hand, felt nothing; but
he easily devoured all the honors
held out to him: these were the on
ly sustenance left which satisfied
his hunger for mockery.

Now his are the crimson hands
which hold aloft the golden blade, his
the face behind the mask with seven
eyes. And he is the one who stands
in shining robes before the massive
idol of moons, trembling the while
with wonder.

Hallowmas 1989 / 33

ORDER OF ILLUSION

By Thomas Ligotti

It seemed to him that the old
mysteries had been made for another
universe, and not the one he came to
know. Vet there was no doubt that
they had once deeply impressed him.
Intoxicated by their wonder, by raw
wonder itself, he might never have
turned away from the golden blade
held aloft by crimson hands, from
the mask with seven eyes, the idol
of moons, from the ceremony called
the Night of the Night, along with
other rites of illumination and all
the ageless doctrines which derived
from their frenzies. How was it they
failed him? When was the first mo-
ment he found himself growing im-
patient with their music and their
gyrations, when the first moment he
witnessed these mysteries and de-
scended into another kind of wonder?

Before his disillusion was discov-
ered, he walked out on his old sect.
He did not waste any time, however,
in casting about for a new one. Un-
fortunately the same, or very simi-
lar, problems arose with each of
them: they all, in his view, were

nullified by their own profoundness
and by a collection of mysteries that
failed to break the surface of the
bottomless soul, failed to place them-
selves at eye level with things.
These mysteries thus condemned all
that lay outside of them to triviality,
whether deserving of this fate or
not. Injustice was their essence and
their power. Had these routines of
enlightenment actually been intended
for a universe not undermined by
mockery and confusion? But to both-
er even with the dream of such a
place was useless, especially when he
could conceive a pursuit more to the
point. This entailed nothing less
than the invention of a cult, a soli-
tary one to be sure, better suited
to his profane vision.

He set out to locate a site of wor-
ship, a place abandoned, old, isolated
and decayed. Actually there were
many such places to choose from,
and by a completely arbitrary means
of selection, he soon managed to set

tie on one of them. This numinous
structure— bashed in roof and bat-
tered walls — he cluttered with the
fetishes of his new creed. These
consisted of anything he could find
which had a divine aura of disuse,
of unfulfillment, hopelessness, disin-
tegration, of grotesque imbecility and
senselessness. Dolls with broken
faces he put on display in corners
and upon crumbling pedestals. Thin,
lifeless trees he dug up whole from
their natural graves and trans
planted into the cracked tiles of the
floor's mosaic; then he hung lamps
of thick green glass by corroded
chains from the ceiling, and the
withered branches of the trees were
bathed in hues of livid mold. As
were the faces of the dolls and those
of various mummified creatures, in
eluding two human abortions which
were set floating in jars at opposite
ends of an altar draped with rags.
His vestments were also rags, their
frayed edges fluttering like dead
leaves about to fall. Standing before
the altar, he raised his arms over
something that smoldered, which was
his own dried excrement upon a tar-
nished plate. He glanced about at
the defunct forest of which he was
king, at the brittle twisting branches
(some of which were adorned with
hanging dolls and other things), at
all the various objects of refuse he
had added to his collection, finally
at the green waters of those two oc
cupied jars glowing upon the rags
of the altar, and he widened his
mouth to speak, and he said . . .
nothing. So distracted was he with
a gruesome contentment: his old

wonder had been ravaged and his
hunger for mockery fulfilled.

But this contentment did not last,
how could it? Illusion throws its in-
visible shimmer over all things, no
matter what level of debasement they
have struggled to win. Whatever
may appear, sooner or later, will ap-
pear in greatness. Thus, gradually,
the pathetic, lusterless world he had
made, and labored to make low, had

3 1 ) / Crypt of Cthuthu

rebelliously elevated itself beyond
its surface decrepitude and assumed
a kind of grandeur in his eyes. The
naked limbs of what had once been
trees and now were empty objects,
hollow abstractions mocked by the
sarcastic verdure of the green
lamps, underwent transfiguration to
inherit the suppleness of all sym-
bols and the dignity of a dream.
Each of the disfigured dolls, vile
and insane mimics of the human
nightmare, gave up their evil and
revealed themselves as the protec-
tors of countless inexpressible mys-
teries and myriad secret enchant-
ments. And the precocious corpses
upon the altar no longer drifted
about pointlessly, embalmed in their
wombs of foggy glass, but hovered
serenely in becalmed fathoms of in-
finite wonder.

His effort to strip away the fin-
ery of objects and events, and to
exist only in the balm of desolation,
was a failure. The experiment had
only resulted in the discovery of a
deeper stratum of preciousness in
things. And having revealed this
substratum, his eyes began to at-
tack its treasures with all their sav-
age wondering. Everything became
newly subject to a mockery that was
not of his own making, and to an
onslaught of confusion that threat-
ened to violate his precious world
of death and dolls. But was there
perhaps a more profound source of
mockery and confusion that could be
excavated beneath the deceptive
wealth which he had so quickly ex-
hausted? If there was, he did not
possess the ambition, at this point,
to seek it out. Dropping to the shat-
tered mosaic of the floor, collapsing
under the now lovely doll-hung
trees, he lay stagnant in ragged
robes of despair throughout a full
day and late into the night.

But toward the latest hour of
evening he was disturbed by distant
sounds. He had been away from his
old sect so long that at first he did
not recognize the peculiar clamor of
the ceremony called the Night of the
Night. When he walked out into the
cold air outside his solitary temple,
(continued on page 32)

Hallowmas 1989 / 35

CHARNELHOUSE OF THE MOON

By Thomas Ligotti

Entranced hilarity was perhaps
his first but certainly not his only
reaction when from a hidden bed of
shadows he gazed upon the place
and its curious workings. He had
journeyed far too far merely for
that. And truly novel sensations
were rare enough without diluting
them in the swill of banal combina
tions. Much, much more, he had
heard, awaited one who would go
down from the moon's crystal dusted
mirror of dreams and travel to that
flashy mound which stood out from
the void like a chunk of fresh meat
set redly within a diamond. There,
they said with voices thin and fine
as the air of imagination, you may
roll your eyes in a living mirror
and leave your lunar immunity to
such things . . . behind. It is our
reflecting reservoir, so to speak,
where a graveyard has sunk low
into the muck. Oh, we envisag e it
endlessly in our cerebral exploits of
the cosmic macabre; but go, go
there if you must, and see.

He did see, after arduously
strolling across a landscape colored
in a rainbow of open wounds, radi-
ant against the blackness that waits
beyond the footlights of stark au-
topsies. With a little skip he leapt
over streams, their translucence
divided into a veinwork of tribu-
taries, viscous but still chuckling
through crow footed ruts. He was
tempted to drink from these, never
having refreshed himself with any-
thing so palpable; but this was a
minor delight and he could save its
savoring as a final consolation should
his destination disappoint him in
more ways than he could reasonably
expect. And here at last in truth
it was: the distinguished thing.

It seemed no more than a big
box of boards soaring like a moun-
tain where gleaming black clouds
roil about the summit. It was cheap-
ly buttressed at its base by long
planks which leaned against the

walls like unvigilant watchmen.
Other comparisons he could easily
have conjured but needed to con
serve his imagination for the no
doubt inspiring feast inside the
amazing structure. He entered un-
seen amid darkness and confusion
and sounds of labor.

Entranced hilarity was perhaps
his first but certainly not his only
reaction when from a hidden bed
of shadows he gazed upon the place
and its curious workings. Complex
hybrids and cross-breeds of senti-
ments were born from each strange
menage of mind, emotions, and
senses. So this was what it was
like to live outside the austere at-
mosphere of the lunar visionary— to,
in fact, live at all in any proper
sense of the word. The place, to
put it plainly and without the evo-
cations of vagueness, was . . . was
something quite similar in principal
to what a complete outsider's con-
ception of a slaughterhouse might
be. The beasts themselves did not
make any audible sound, standing
uniformly docile, cornered in fragile
corrals. To his hearing, however,
their very silence seemed a kind of
music, a sterile harmony as pure as
the white of their hides, the white
lines of their elegant necks and
glassy manes. And they all re

mained unspattered despite the
gloomy filth that seemed to be ev-
erywhere. even rising from the
ground as a gray ghost of steam.

Marauding through the greasy
haze were huge men who apparently
were clad in nothing but long,
black, rubbery aprons. Their faces
were parodies of divinities of apes.
They moved with graceless delibera-
tion (his exact impression was more
expansively articulated), as if they
were being just adequately manipu-
lated by powers in themselves more
stealthy. Still, the pristinely pale
creatures obeyed them without a
struggle, glancing upward a little

36 / Crypt of Cthulhu

shyly at the last moment when the
gory mallei came down and smashed
them between the eyes, right below
the spot where a spiraled horn pro
jected from their sweatless fore-
heads. The gods, he imagined, had
no uncertain uses for such well-
formed cornua. Without delay the
butchers separated these append-
ages from the fallen carcasses.
They appeared to snap off easily,
like icicles.

He then watched the flaying of
the carcasses and the hanging of
the hides along the wall like old
coats. What royal stoles these would
make! he thought, for a monarch of
the imagination. And the creature's
meat was laid bare: an inner pink

as perfect as their outer white. (It
was all so exciting, he gasped in-
wardly in the shadows.) The ideal
fare for one not accustomed to
gross nourishment. But what a
scandal the way the processing was
handled, the way hooks came down
from high above and brusquely
lifted the pretty flesh into the
blackness. Was there even a roof
to this colosseum of butchery, or
did the eye glancing upwards see
far over the walls and deep into the
old, old well of the abyss? His fair
eyelashes fluttered with dreams and
curiosity, a cornucopia of universal
figures and fancy images. Then his
reverie was brought to an end,
quite crudely interrupted; and en-
tranced hilarity, leaping toward
hysteria, was only a small part of
what he felt.

Well now, look what we got here,
brothers, said one of the big boys
in black apron, massaging his meaty
and enbristled cheeks in a fairytale
parody of thoughtfulness. The
others gathered around, some car
rying monstrous mallets and others
caressing the blades of surgically
sharp instruments. They chuckled
unambiguously. They nodded. They
whispered among themselves. (A
simple style is best now.) They
watched one of his pale, slender
hands wipe something from his taut
brow. He then stared at his open
hand as though at something he had
never seen or imagined. And then

he realized the sort of place he was
in: that the filthy glamor of it was

just a disguise for another place
which was without light or aii — a
jewel-hard darkness. A place he
could never know in the way he
really wanted. And he realized
what was going to happen to him
now. The massive figures hefted
their tools, closing in. And he
laughed a little, for at that moment
entranced hilarity was not entirely
absent from his perception of this
pageant . . . and the obscure but

demanding role he was about to
play.

TEN STEPS TO THIN MOUNTAIN

(continued from page 37)

known about it all along. I hear
them discussing it everywhere. Oh,
Thin Mountain, yes. Thin Mountain,
certainly.

9. On Thin Mountain no one talks
about Thin Mountain.

10. The train will be here soon.

MAIL- CALL (from page 9)
destroy it, but merely put it aside.
We have Leiber's own estimation of
the word count as 3,000. but that
seems to fall within the realm of
acceptable error after a lapse of 30
years. As for the title, Leiber
writes that the story was "to be
titled The Burrowers Beneath ."
Even though his correspondence
with Berglund shows him using "The
Lovecraftian Story" like a bona fide
title, I find it hard to believe he
would have tried writing and mar-
keting a story so-named, especially
while Lovecraft was still alive.
Sounds to me like an informal work
ing title for a story in progress:
you know, I could just imagine John
W. Campbell asking Leiber what
kind of writing he was doing and
Leiber replying, "Well, I have 'The
Witchcraft-as-Physics Story' (Con-
jure Wife), 'The Physics-as-Witch-
craft Story' ( Gather Darkness ) and
(continued on page 41)

Hallowmas 1989 / 37

TEN STEPS TO THIN MOUNTAIN

By I homas Ligotti

1 . One day I saw it on a very old

map: Thin Mountain. No elevation

was noted. In my mind vague
images began to form. I set the
map aside and closed my eyes.
Then there was a sudden commo-
tion, the kind that may start up
anyplace, whether on a train rock-
ing along its tracks or just an old
bench somewhere. A group of peo
pie ran by, waving their arms and
making odd noises. What was it
that suddenly made me reach for
the old map, only to find it was
gone' And I just sat there wonder-
ing what things were really like on
Thin Mountain.

2. No one knows all the legends

inspired by Thin Mountain, but here
are a few I've recently picked up:
that the air up there will turn you
into a raving visionary in a matter
of hours, that after a few days you
experience strange yearnings that
are impossible to fulfill, that long-
time residents become immortal and
after death walk the woods as skel-
etons. What can you expect from
hearsay? But one thing is certain
among these conjectures: no one

wants to give Thin Mountain a
chance .

3. Only one way to Thin Mountain:
absolute madness. By this I mean
to put forth no clever insight. To
be at eye le vel with the world clear
ly leads straight to nowhere; on
the other hand, once your gaze
slips off the horizontal, everything
else goes with it. That is to say,
no one can any longer vouch for
your sanity. You have become . .

wayward. A grinning dwarf
beckons you from the ledge of a
tall building, gargoyles perched on
cathedrals angle their snouts in a
certain direction. And before you
know it, you're lying around on
Thin Mountain!

4. Not all that I have discovered
about Thin Mountain is pleasant.
Despite a great deal of picturesque
scenery— floating strands of mist,
narrow trees, fabulous fingerlike
peaks— this region contains more
than a few perils. One of them is
a solitude fit only for fanatics of
exile, their eyes always draining
the distances. Another is a wind
which seems to be composed of
countless tiny voices, the chatter-
ing populus of an invisible uni-
verse. The half-lit days and the
sorcery of its nights, moments in
which nothing moves and others in
which everything does. But what
else would you expect from a place
called Thin Mountain?

5. Once I heard the words "Thin

Mountain" spoken in a crowd. Did
I say that I saw who said it? I did
not. It could have been anyone

standing along the platform, waiting
for the train to arrive. The same
day someone threw himself under
that train. He was cut in half, . .

. but what a happy expression was
plastered on the face of that
corpse. "Thin Mountain!" I couldn't
help crying out in front of every-
one. But as I suspected, no one

came forward to confront me.

6. Not once but a thousand times
I wished to dwell forever on Thin
Mountain, even at the price of my
life or my sanity. No happiness
except on those peaks!

7. One morning I awoke with great
difficulty, and the pain, the noise
was worse than ever. All day the
pain, the noise. All day Thin
Mountain .

8. Nothing secret, I now realize,
concerning the existence of Thin
Mountain. It seems everyone has

(continued on page 36)

38 / Crypt ot Clhulhu

SELECTIONS OF LOVECRAFT

By Thomas Ligotti

THE FABULOUS ALIENATION OF
THE OUTSIDER. BEING OF
NO FIXED ABODE

The outsider lifts his shadow-
wearied eyes and gazes about the
moldy chamber where, to his knowl-
edge, he has always lived. He has
no recollection who he is or how he
came to dwell so tar removed trom
others of his kind who, he reasons,
must exist, perhaps in that world
high above which he vividly re-
calls, though he glimpsed it only
once and long ago.

One night the outsider emerges
from his underground domain and,
guided solely by the glowing moon
he has never really seen before,
scrambles down a dark road, search-
ing for friendly lights and, he
hopes, friendly faces.

Eventually he comes upon a
large, festively illuminated house.
At first he peeks shyly through
the windows at the partiers inside;
but soon his unbearable longing for
the society of others, along with a
barely evolved sense of etiquette,
liberate him from all hesitancies.
Locating at last an unlocked door,
he crashes the affair .

Inside the house— a structure of
gorgeous, Georgian decor — everyone
screams and flees at first sight of
the outsider. After only a few sec-
onds of recognition and companion-
ship, this recluse by default is
once again left to keep tiis own
company. That is to say, he has
been abandoned to the company of
that untimely horror which initially
set those gay and fine-looking peo-
ple so indecorously on their heels.
"What was it?" he asks himself,
posing the question over and over
with seemingly infinite repetition
before finally collecting wits to
squint a little to one side. "What
was it?" he asks for the infinite
time add one or two. "It was you,"
answers the mirror. "It was you!"

Now it is the outsider's turn to
make his getaway from that hideous
living corpse of unholy and un
wholesome familiarity, that thing
which had imperfectly decomposed
in its subterranean unresting place.
He seeks refuge in a chaotic dream-
world where no one really notices
the dead and no one even looks
twice at the disgusting.

Eventually, however, he tires of
this deranged, though unhostile,
dimension of alienage. His heart
more pulverized than simply broken,
he decides to return to the sub
humous envelope from which he
never should have strayed, there
to reclaim his birthright of sloth,
amnesia, and darkness. A period of
time passes, indefinite for the out-
sider though decisive for the bal-
ance of the world's population.

For reasons unknown, the out-
sider once more drags his bulky
frame earthwards. Arriving ex-
hausted in the superterranean realm,
he finds himself standing, badly,
in neither darkness nor daylight,
but some morbid transitional phase
between the two. A senile sun
throbs with deathly dimness, and
every living thing on the fare of
the land has been choked by deso-
lation and by an equivocal gloom
which has perhaps already lasted
millenia, if not longer. The out
sider, a thing of the dead, has
managed to outlive all those others
whom, either from madness or mere
loss of memory, he would willingly
seek out to escape a personal void
prior to astronomy.

This possibility is now, of course,
as defunct as the planet itself. With
all biology in tatters, the outsider
will never again hear the consoling
gasps of those who shunned him
and in whose eyes and hearts he
achieved a certain tangible identity,
however loathsome. Without' the
others he simply cannot go on being
himself— The Outsider — for there is

Hallowmas 1989 / 39

no longer anyone to be outside of!
In no time at all he is overwhelmed
by this atrocious paradox of fate.

In the midst of this revelation,
a feeling begins to well up within
the outsider, an incalculable sorrow
deep inside. From the center of
his being (which is now the center
of all being that remains in exis
tence) he summons a suicidal out-
burst of pain whose force shatters
his rotting shape into hopelessly
innumerable fragments. Catastroph
ically enough, this antic, designed
to conclude universal genocide,
gives off such energy that the dis-
tant sun is revived by a transfu
sion of warmth and light.

And each fragment of the out-
sider cast far across the earth now
absorbs the warmth and catches the
light, reflecting the future life and
festivals of a resurrected race of
beings: ones who will remain for-

ever ignorant of their origins but
for whom the sight of a surface of
cold, unyielding glass will always
hold profound and unexplainable
terrors .

1 Ht BLASPHEMOUS ENLIGHTEN-
MENT OF PROF. FRANCIS
NAYLAND THURSTON. OF

BOSTON. PROVIDENCE. AND
THE HUMAN RACE

In the late 1920s Prof. Thurston
is putting a few final touches to a
manuscript he intends no other per-
son ever to lay eyes on, so that no
one else will have to suffer unnec
essarily in the way he has this past
year or so. When it's all done with,
he just sits in silence for a few
moments in the library of his Bos-
ton home (summer sunlight wander-
ing over the oak walls), and then
he breaks down and weeps like a
lost soul for the better part of the
day, letting up later that evening.

Prof. Thurston is the nephew of
George Gammell Angell, also a pro-
fessor (at Brown U., Providence,
R I ) . whose archaeological and an-
thropological unearthings led him,
and after his death led his nephew,
to some disturbing conclusions con-
cerning the nature and fate of hu-

man life, with implications universal
even in their least astounding as-
pects.

They discovered, positively, that
throughout the world there exist
savage cults which practice strange
rites: degenerate Eskimos in the

Arctic, degenerate Caucasians in
New England seaport towns, and de-
generate Indians and mulattoes in
the Louisiana swamps not far from
Tulane University, New Orleans.
The two professors also discovered
that the primary aim of these cults
is to await and welcome the return
of ante prehistoric monstrosities
which will unseat the human race,
overrun the earth, and generally
have their way with our world.

These beings are as detestably
inhuman as humanly imaginable,
though no more so. From the com-
mon individual's viewpoint their
nature is one of supreme evil and
insanity, notwithstanding that the
creatures themselves are indifferent
to, if not totally unaware of, such
mundane categories of value.

From the beginning of time they
have held a certain attraction for
persons interested in pursuing an
existence of utter chaos and may-
hem; that is, one of complete liber-
ation at all conceivable levels.

After learning the designs these
beings have on our planet. Prof.
Thurston just assumes he will be
murdered to keep him quiet on the
subject, as his uncle and others
have been. (And to think that at
one point in his investigation he was
planning to publish his findings in
the journal of the American Archae-
ological Society!) All he can do
now is wait.

For some reason, however, the
followers of the Great Old Ones (as
the extraterrestrial entities are re-
ferred to) never follow through,
and Prof. Thurston appears to es-
cape assassination, at least for an
indefinite period of time. But this
is little comfort, because knowing
what he knows. Prof. Thurston is
the most miserable man on earth.
He grieves for his lost dream, and
even the skies of spring and flow-
ers of summer are a horror to his

40 t Crypt of Cthulhu

eyes. It goes without saying that
he now finds even the simplest
daily task a joyless requisite for
survival, and no more.

After months of boredom and a
personal devastation far worse than
any worldwide apocalypse could pos-
sibly be, he decides to return to
his old job at the university. Not
that fie believes any longer in the
hollow conclusions of his once be-
loved anthropology , but at least it
would give him a way to occupy
himself, to lose himself. Still, he
continues to be profoundly despon-
dent and his looks degenerate be-
yond polite comment.

"What's wrong. Professor Thurs-
ton?" a student asks him one day
after class. The professor glances
up at the girl. After only the
briefest gaze into her eyes he can
see that she really cares. "Amaz-
ing," he thinks. Of course there
is no way he could tell her what is
really wrong, but they do talk for
a while and later take a walk across
the campus on a clear autumn after-
noon. They begin to see each
other secretly off campus, and with
graduation day behind them they
finally get married, their ceremony
solemn and discreet.

The couple honeymoons at a
picturesque little town on the sea-
coast of Massachusetts. To all ap-
pearances, several sublime days
pass without one ripple of grief.
One day, as he and his bride watch
the sun descend into a perfectly
unwrinkled ocean. Prof. Thurston
almost manages to rationalize into
nonexistence his dreadful knowl-
edge. After all, he tells himself,
there still exist precious human
feeling and human beauty (e.g.,
the quaint little town) created by
human hands. These things have
been perennially threatened by dis-
order and oblivion. Anyway, all of
it was bound to end somehow, at
sometime. What difference did it
make when the world was lost, or
to whom?

But Prof. Thurston cannot sus-
tain these consoling thoughts for
long. All during their honeymoon
he snaps pictures of his smiling

wife. He loves her, dearly, but

her innocence is tearing him apart.
How long can he conceal the terri-
ble things he knows about himself,
about her, and about the world?
Even after he takes a picture, this
wonderful girl just keeps smiling at
him! How long can he live with
this new pain?

The problem continues of obsess
him (to the future detriment, he
fears, of his marriage). Then, on
the last night of the honeymoon .

. . everything is resolved.

He awakens in the darkness from
a strange dream he cannot recall.
Outside the window of the bedroom
it sounds as though the whole town
is in an ambivalent uproar: hyster
ical voices blending festival and
catastrophe. And there are weirdly
colored lights quivering upon the
bedroom wall. Prof. Thurston's
wife is also awake, and she says to
her husband: "The new masters

have come in the night to their
chosen city. Have you dreamed of
them?" There passes a moment of
silence. Then, at last. Prof. Thurs-
ton answers his wife with the long
abandoned howl of a madman or a
beast, for he too has dreamed the
new dream and, without his con-
scious knowledge or consent, has
embraced the new world.

And now nothing can hurt him
as he has been so cruelly hurt in
the past. Nothing will ever again
cause him that pain he suffered so
long, an intolerable anguish from
which he could never have found
release in any other way.

THE PREMATURE DEATH OF

H. P. LOVECRAFT. OLDEST

MAN IN NEW ENGLAND

H. P. Lovecraft, the last great
writer of supernatural horror tales,
has just died of stomach cancer at
the age of 46 in a Providence, Rhode
Island, hospital. He died alone and
with no particular expression on his
face. Upon the nightstand next to
his bed are a few books and many
handwritten pages in which Love-
craft recorded the sensations of his
dying. (These latter are later lost,

Hallowmas 1989 / 91

to the dismay of scholars.)

Two nurses came into the room
and are the first to discover that
the gentleman in the private room
has, not unexpectedly, passed
away. They have already seen
death many times in their nursing
careers (they're both quite young),
and neither is alarmed. They know
nothing can be done for the dead
man. One of them says: "Open a

window, it's stuffy in here." "Sure
is," replies the other. A crisp
mid-March breeze freshens the
room.

"Well, there's no more that can
be done for him," comments the
first nurse. Then she asks: "Do

you remember if he had a wife or
anybody who visited him?" The
other nurse shakes her head nega-
tively, then adds: "Are you kid-

ding? He's not exactly the husband
type. I mean, just take a look at
that face, will you." The first
nurse nods positively, makes a
humorous remark about the de-
ceased, and then both nurses leave
the room smiling.

But apparently neither of them
noticed the fantastic and frighten-
ing thing which occurred right be-
fore their eyes: H. P. Lovecraft,

for only the shortest lived moment,
had faintly— just ever so, no more-
smiled back at them.

MAIL- CALL (from page 36)
then there's 'The Lovecraftian Sto-
ry' (T he Burrowers Beneath )."

Let me conclude by saying that
Cry pt readers who have not read
Leiber's Fantastic review owe it to
themselves to locate a copy. It is
one of the most concise and thought-
ful appraisals of the differences be-
tween Lovecraft's fiction and mod-
ern Mythos fiction I've ever read,
one that leaves open the question
of whether we have the right to
decide what is or is not Mythos
fiction. Also, I find it interesting
that Leiber claims to have been In-
culcated with "scientific skepticism
toward all branches of the occult"
by Lovecraft. Less than six years
(continued on page 52)

M2 / Crypt of Cthulhu

THE CONSOLATIONS OF HORROR

By Thomas Ligotti

DARKNESS, WE WELCOME AND
EMBRACE YOU

. Horror, at least in its artistic
presentations. can be a comfort.
And, like any agent of enlighten-
ment. it may even confer— if briefly
a sense of power, wisdom, and
transcendence, especially if the
conferee is a willing one with a
true feeling for ancient mysteries
and a true fear of the skulduggery
which a willing heart usually senses
in the unknown.

Clearly we (just the willing con-
ferees remember) want to know the
worst, both about ourselves and
the world. The oldest, possibly
the only theme is that of forbidden
knowledge. And no forbidden knowl
edge ever consoled its possessor.
(Which is probably why it's forbid-
den.) At best it is one of the more
sardonic gifts bestowed upon the
individual (for knowledge of the
forbidden is first and foremost an
individual ordeal). It is particular-
ly forbidden because the mere pos-
sibility of such knowledge intro-
duces a monstrous and perverse
temptation to trade the guiet plea-
sures of mundane existence for the
bright lights of alienage, doom,
and, in some rare cases, eternal
damnation.

So we not only wish to know the
worst, but to experience it as well.

Hence that arena of artificial ex-
perience is supposedly the worst
kind— the horror story — where grue-
some conspiracies may be trumped
up to our soul's satisfaction, where
the deck is stacked with shivers,
shocks, and dismembered hands for
every player; and, most important
ly, where one, at a safe distance,
can come to grips (after a fashion)
with death, pain, and loss in the,
quote, real world, unquote.

But does it ever work the way
we would like it to?

A TEST CASE

I am watching Ni ght of the Liv
inq Dead for the tenth time. I see
the ranks of the deceased reani-
mated by a double-edged marvel of
the modern age (atomic radiation, I
think. Or is it some wonder chem-
ical which found its way into the
water supply? And does this detail
even matter?). I see a group of
average, almost documentary types
holed up in a house, fighting off
wave after wave of hungry ghouls.

I see the group hopelessly losing
their ground and succumb each one
of them to the same disease as their
sleepwalking attackers: A husband

tries to eat his wjfe (or is it mother
tries to eat child?), a daughter
stabs her father with a gardener's
trowel (or perhaps brother stabs
sister with a bricklayer's trowel).
In any case, they all die, and hor-
ribly. This is the important thing.

When the movie is over, I am
bolstered by the sense of having
rung the ear -shattering changes of
harrowing horror; I've got another
bad one under my belt (no less
than for the tenth time) which will
serve to bolster my nerves for
whatever shocking days and nights
are to come; I have, in a phrase,
an expanded capacity for fear. I
can really take it!

At the movies, that is.

The fearful truth is that all of
the above brutalities can be taken
only too well. And then, at some
point, one starts to adopt unnatural
strategies to ward off not the bogey
but the sand man. Talking to the
characters in a horror film, for in
stance: Hi, Mr. Decomposing Corpse
lapping up a lump of sticky en-
trails, Hi! But even this tactic
loses its charm after a while, es-
pecially if you're watching some
"shocker" by yourself and lack an
accomplice to share your latest stage

Hallowmas 1989 / 93

of jadedness and immunity to prim
itive fright. (At the movies, I
mean. Otherwise you're the same

old vulnerable self. )

So after a devoted horror fan is
stuffed to the gills, thoroughly
sated and consequently bored— what
does he (the he's traditionally out-
number the she's here) do next?
Haunt the emergency rooms of hos
pitals or the local morgues? Keep
an eye out for the bloody mishaps
on the freeway? Become a war cor-
respondent? But now the issue has
been blatantly shifted to a com
pletely different plane — from movies
to life— and clearly it doesn't belong
there .

The one remedy for the horror
addict's problem seems this: that if
the old measure of medicine is just
not strong enough — increase the
dosage! (This pharmaceutical par-
allel is ancient but apt.) And thus
we have the well-known and very
crude basis for the horror film's
history of ever-escalating scare tac-
tics. Have you already seen such
old standards as Werewolf of London
too many times? Sample one of its
gore-enriched, yet infinitely inferior
versions of the early 1980s. Of
course the relief is only temporary;
one's tolerance to the drug tends to
increase. And looking down that
long open road there appears to be
no ultimate drugstore in sight, no
final pharmacy where the horror
hunger can be glutted on a suffi
ciently enormous dose, where the
once insatiable addict may, at last,
be heavied with all the demonic
dope there is, collapse with sated
obesity into the shadows, and qui-
etly gasp: "enough."

The empty pit of boredom is ever
renewing itself, while the horror
films become less tantalizing to the
marginally sadistic moviegoer.

And what is the common rationale
for justifying what would otherwise
be considered a just barely frus-
trated case of sadomasochism? Now
we remember: to present us with

horrors inside the theatre (or the
books, let's not forget those) and
thereby help us to assimilate the
horrors on the outside, and also to

ready us for the Big One. This
does sound reasonable, it sounds
right and rational. But none of this
has anything to do with these three
R's. We are in the great forest of
fear, where you can't fight real ex-
periences of the worst with fake
ones (no matter how well synchro-
nized a symbolic correspondence
they may have). When is the last
time you heard of someone scream-
ing himself awake from a nightmare,
only to shrug it off with: "Yeah,

but I've seen worse at the movies"
(or read worse in the books; we'll
get to them)? Nothing is worse
than that which happens personally
to a person. And though a bad
dream may momentarily register
quite high on the fright meter, it
is, realistically speaking, one of
the less enduring, smaller time
terrors a person is up against. Try
drawing solace from your half-dozen
viewings of the Tex as Chain-Saw
Massacre when they're prepping
you for brain surgery.

In all truth, frequenters of hor-
ror films are a jumpier, more cas-
ually hysterical class of person than
most. (Statistics available on re-
quest.) We need the most reassur-
ance that we can take it as well as
anyone, and we tend to be the most
complacent in thinking that seven-
teen straight nights of supernatu-
ral-psycho films is good for the
nerves and will give us a special
power which non-horror fanatics
don't have. After all, this is sup-
posed to be a major psychological
selling point of the horror racket,
the first among its consolations.

It is undoubtedly the first con-
solation, but it's also a false one.

INTERLUDE: SO LONG

CONSOLATIONS OF MAYHEM

Perhaps it was a mistake select-
ing Night of th e Living D ead to il-
lustrate the consolations of horror.
As a delegate from Horrorland this
film is admirably incorruptible, ooz-
ing integrity. It hasn't sold out to
the kindergarten moral codes of
most "modern horror" movies and it
has no particular message to de-

<1 'I / Crypt ol Cthulhu

liver: its only news is nightmare.

For pure brain-chomping, nerve-
chewing, sight-cursing insanity,
this is a very effective work, at
least the first couple of times or
so. It neither tries nor pretends
to be anything beyond that. (And
as we have already found, nothing
exists beyond that anyway, except
more and more of Uaat.) But the
big trouble is that sometimes we
forget how much more can be done
in horror movies (books too!) than
that. We sometimes forget that
supernatural stories— and this is a
very good time to boot nonsuper-
natural ones right off the train:
psycho, suspense, and the like— are
capable of all the functions and
feelings of real stories. For the
supernatural can serve as a trusty
vehicle for careening into realms
where the Strange and the Familiar
charge each other with the oppos-
ing poles of their passion.

The Haunting , for example. Be-
sides being the greatest haunted
house film ever made, it is also a
great haunted human one. In it
the ancient spirit of mortal tragedy
passes easily through walls dividing
the mysteries of the mundane world
from those of the extra-mundane.
And tfiis supertragic spectre never
comes to rest in either one of these
worlds; it never lingers long enough
to give us forbidden knowledge of
the stars or ourselves, or anything
else for that matter. To what ex-
tent may the "derangement of Hill
House" (Dr. Markway's diagnosis) be
blamed on the derangement of the
people who were, are, and probably
will be in it? And vice versa of
course. Is there something wrong
with that spiral staircase in the
library or just with the clumsy per-
sons who try to climb it? The only
safe bet is that something is wrong,
wherever the wrongness lies . . .
and lies and lies. Our poor quartet
of spook-chasers— Dr. Markway,
Theo, Luke, and Eleanor— are not
only helpless to untie themselves
from entangling puppet strings;
they can't even find the knots!

The ghosts at Hill House always
remain unseen, except in their ef-

fects: savagely pummeling enor-

mous oak doors, bending them like
cardboard; writing assonant mes-
sages on walls ("Help Eleanor come
home") with an unspecified sub-
stance ("Chalk," says Luke. "Or
something like chalk," corrects
Markway.); and in general giving
the place a very bad feeling. We're
not even sure who the ghosts are,
or rather were. The pious and de-
mented Hugh Crane, who built Hill
House? His spinster daughter Abi-
gail, who wasted away in Hill House?
Her neglectful companion, who hung
herself in Hill House? None of them
emerges as a discrete, clearly de-
finable haunter of the old mansion.
Instead we have an undefined pres
ence which seems a sort of melting
pot of deranged forces from the
past, an anti-America where the
very poorest in spirit settle and
stagnate and lose themselves in a
massive and insane spectral body.

Easier to identify are the per-
sonal spectres of the living, at
least for the viewer. But the char-
acters in the film are too busy with
outside things to look inside one
another's houses, or even their
own. Dr. Markway doesn't ac
knowledge Eleanor's spooks. (She
loves him. hopelessly.) Eleanor
can't see Theo's spooks (she's les-
bian) and Theo avoids dwelling on
her own. ("And what are you
afraid of, Theo?" asks Eleanor. "Of
knowing what I really want," she
replies, somewhat uncandidly.) Best
of all though is Luke, who doesn't
think there ever are any spooks,
until near the end of the film when
this affable fun-seeker gains an ex-
cruciating sense of the alienation,
perversity, and strangeness of the
world around him. "It should be
burned to the ground," he says of
the high priced house he is to in-
herit. "and the earth sown with
salt." This quasi-biblical quote in-
dicates that more than a few doors
have been kicked down in Luke's
private passageways. He knows now!
Poor Eleanor, of course, has been
claimed by the house as one of its
lonely, faceless citizens of eternity.
It is her voice that gets to deliver

Hallowmas 1989 / 85

the reverberant last lines of the
film: "Hill House has stood for

eighty years and will probably
stand for eighty more . . . but

whatever walks there, walks alone."
With these words the viewer glimpses
a realm of unimaginable pain and
horror, an unfathomable region of
aching Gothic turmoil, a weird nev-
ermoresville.

The experience is extremely dis-
consoling but nonetheless exhilarat-
ing .

But for a movie to convey such
intense feeling for the supernatural
is rare. (This one of course is a
scrupulously faithful adaptation of
Shirley Jackson's unarguably excel-
lent novel.) The thing that is
quite common, especially with fic-
tion. is the phenomenon that pro-
duced the single-sentence para-
graph above, in other words— the
horror story's paradox of entertain-
ment. The thumping heart of the
question, though, is what really
entertains us? In opposition, that
is, to what we imagine entertains
us. Entertainment, whatever we
imagine its real source, is rightly
regarded as its own justification,
and this seems to be one of the un-
assailable consolations of horror.

But is it? (This won't take
long . )

ANOTHER TFST CASE

We are reading — in a quiet, cozy
room, it goes without saying— one of
M. R. James' powerful ghost stories.
It is "Count Magnus," in which a
curious scholar gains knowledge he
didn't even know was forbidden and
suffers the resultant doom at the
hands of the count and his beten-
tacled companion. The story actu-
ally ends before we have a chance
to witness its fabulous coup de
grace, but we know that a sucked-
off face is in store for our scholar.
Meanwhile we sit on the sidelines
(sipping a warm drink, probably)
as the doomed academic meets a fate
worse than any we'll ever know. At
least we think it's worse, we hope
't is . deep, deep in the sub-

cellars of our minds we pray:

"Please don't let anything even Mke
that happen to me! Not to me. Let
it always be the other guy and I'll
read about him. even tremble for
him a little. Besides, I'm having
so much fun, it can't be all that
terrible. For him, that is. For me
it would be unbearable. See how
shaky and excitable I get just read-
inq about it. So please let it al-
ways be the other guy."

But it can't always be the other
guy, for in the long run we're all.
each of us, the other guy.

Of course in the short run it's
one of life's minor ecstacies — an un-
doubted entertainment to read
about a world in which the very
worst doom takes place in a re-
stricted area we would never ever
wander into and befalls somebody
else. And this is the run in which
all stories are read, as well as
written. (If something with eyes
like two runny eggs were after your
carcass, would you sit down and
write a story about it?) It's an
other world, the short run, it's a
world where horror really is a true
consolation. But it's no compliment
to Dr. James or to ourselves as
readers to put too much stock in
ghost stories as a consolation for
our mortality, our vulnerability to
real-life terrors. As consolations
go, this happens to be a pretty
low-grade one— demented compla-
cency posing as beatitudes.

So our second consolation lives
on borrowed time at best. And in
the long-run where no mere tale
can do you much good — is delusory.

(Perhaps the stories of H. P.
Lovecraft offer a more threatening
and admirable role to those of us
devoted to doom. In Lovecraft's
work doom is not restricted to ec-
centric characters in eccentric situ-
ations. It begins there but ulti-
mately expands to violate the safety
zone of the reader [and the non-
reader for that matter, though the
latter remains innocent of Love-
craft's forbidden knowledge]. M. R.
James' are cautionary tales, lessons
in how to stay out of spectral trou-
ble and how nice and safe it feels
to do so. But within the cosmic

4b / Crypt of Cthulhu

boundaries of Lovecraft's universe,
which many would call the universe
itself, we are already in trouble,
and feeling safe is out of the ques-
tion for anyone with some brains
and a chance access to the manu-
scripts of Albert Wilmarth, Nathaniel
Wingate Peaslee, or Prof. Angell's
nephew. These isolated narrators
take us with them into their doom,
which is the world's. I No one ever
gives a hoot what happens to Love-
craft's characters as individuals.)
If we knew what they know about
the world and about our alarmingly
tentative place in it, our brains
would indeed reel with the revela
tion. And if we found out what Jer-
myn found out about ourselves and
our humble origins in a mere mad-
ness of biology, we would do as he
did with a few gallons of gasoline
and a merciful match. Of course
Lovecraft insists on telling us things
it does no good to know: things
that can't help us or protect us or
even prepare us for the awful and
inevitable apocalypse to come. The
only comfort is to accept it, live in
it, and sigh yourself into the balm
of living oblivion. If you can only
maintain this constant sense of
doom, you may be spared the pain
of foolish hopes and their impending
demolishment.

But we can't maintain it; only a
saint of doom could. Hope leaks
into our lives by way of spreading
cracks we always meant to repair
but never did. Oddly enough, when
the cracks yawn their widest, and
the promised deluge comes at last,
it is not hope at all that finally
breaks through and drowns us.)

INTERLUDE: SEE YOU LATER.

CONSOLATIONS OF DOOM

So when a fictional state of ab-
solute doom no longer offers us
possibilities of comfort — what's left?
Well, another stock role casts one
not as the victim of a horror story
but as the villain in it. That is.
we get to be the monster for a
change. To a certain extent this
is supposed to happen when we
walk onto those resounding floor-

boards behind the Gothic footlights.
It's traditional to identify with and
feel sorry for the vampire or the
werewolf in their ultimate moment of
weakness, a time when they're most
human. Sometimes, though, it seems
as if there's much fun to be had
playing a vampire or werewolf at
the height of their monstrous, peo-
ple-maiming power. To play them
in our hearts, I mean. After all,
it would be kind of great to wake
up at dusk every day and cruise
around in the shadows and fly on
batwings through the night, stare
strangers in the eye and have them
under your power. Not bad for
someone who's supposed to be dead.
Or rather, for someone who can't
die and whose soul is not his own;
for someone who— no matter how
seemingly suave— is doomed to ride
eternity with a single and highly
embarrassing obsession, the most
debased junkie immortalized.

But maybe you could make it as
a werewolf. For most of a given
month you're just like anybody else.
Then for a few days you can take
a vacation from your puny human
self and spill the blood of puny
human others. And once you re-
turn to your original clothes size,
no one is any the wiser . . . until
next month rolls around and you've
got to do the whole thing again,
month after month, over and over.
Still, the werewolf's lifestyle might
not bfe so bad. as long as you don't
get caught ripping out someone's
throat. Of course, there might be
some guilt involved and, yes, bad
dreams .

Vampirism and lycanthropy do
have their drawbacks, anyone would
admit that. But there would also
be some memorable moments too,
moments humans rarely, if ever,
have: feeling your primal self at

one with the inhuman forces around
you, fearless in the face of night
and nature and solitude and all
those things from which mere peo-
ple have much to fear. There you
are under the moon— a raging storm
in human form. And you'll always
be like that, forever if you're care-
ful. Being a human being is a

Hallowmas 191)9 / 9?

dead end anyway. It would seem
that supernatural sociopaths have
more possibilities open to them.
So wouldn't it he great to be one?
What I mean, of course, is: is it a

consolation of horror fiction to let
us be one for a little while? Yes,
it really is; the attractions of this
life are sometimes irresistible. But
are we missing some point if we
only see the glamour and ignore the
drudgery in the existence of these
free spirited nyctophiles 7 Well, are
we ?

THE LAST TEST

Test cancelled. The consolation
is patently a trick one, done with
invisible writing, mirrors, and
camera magic.

SUBSTITUTE CONSOLATION:

■THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF

USHER. OR DOOM REVISITED*

Did you ever wonder how a
Gothic story like Poe's masterpiece
can be so great without enlisting
the reader's care for its characters'
doom? Plenty of horrible events
and concepts are woven together;
the narrator and his friend Roderick
experience a fair amount of FEAR.
But unlike a horror story whose
effect depends on reader sympathy
with its fictional victims, this one
doesn't want us to get involved with
the characters in that way. Our
fear does not derive from theirs.
Though Roderick, his sister, and
the visiting narrator are fascinating
companions, they do not burden us
with their individual catastrophes.
Are we sad for Roderick's and his
sister's terrible fate? No. Are we
happy the narrator makes a safe
flight from the sinking house? Not
particularly. Then why get upset
about this calamity which takes
place in the backwoods, miles from
the nearest town and everyday
human concerns?

In this story individuals are not
the issue. Everywhere in Poe's
literary universe (Lovecraft's too)
the individual is horribly and com-
fortably irrelevant. During the

reading of "The Fall of the House
of Usher" we don't look over any
particualr character's shoulder but
have our attention distributed god
wise into every corner of a foul
factory which manufactures only
one product: total and inescapable

doom. Whether a given proper noun
escapes or is caught on a given oc
casion is beside the point. This is
a world created with built-in obso-
lescence. and to appreciate fully
this downrunning cosmos one must
take the perspective of its creator,
which is all perspectives without
getting sidetracked into a single
one. Therefore we as readers are
the House of Usher (both family
and structure), we are the fungi
clustering across its walls and the
violent storm over its ancient head;
we sink with the Ushers and get
away with the narrator. In brief,
we play all the roles. And the

consolation in this is that we are
supremely removed from the mad
deningly tragic viewpoint of the
human .

Of course, when the story is
over we must fall from our god's
perch and sink back into human-
ness, which is perhaps what the
Ushers and their house are doing.
This is always a problem for would-
be gods! We can't maintain for
very long a godlike point of view.
Wouldn't it be great if we could;
if life could be lived outside the
agony of the individual 7 But we
are always doomed and redoomed to
become involved with our own lives,
which is the only life there is, and
godlikeness has nothing at all to do
with it.

But still, wouldn't it be great .

DARKNESS. YOU’VE DONE
A LOT FOR US

At this point it may seem that
the consolations of horror are not
what we thought they were, that all
this time we've been keeping com-
pany with illusions. Well, we have.
And we'll continue to do so. con-
tinue to seek the appalling scene
which short-circuits our brain, con-

1)8 / Crypt of Cthulhu

tinue to sit in our numb coziness
with a book of terror on our laps
like a cataleptic predator, and con-
tinue to draw smug solace, if only
for the space ot a story, from a
world made snug and simple by ab
solute hopelessness and doom. These
consolations are still effective, even
if they don't work as well as we
would prefer them to. But they
are only effective, like most things
of value in art or life, as illusions .
And there's no point attributing to
them powers of therapy or salvation
they don't and can't have. There
are enough disappointments in the
world without adding that one.

Perhaps, though, our illusion of
consolation could be enhanced by
acquiring a better sense of what we
are being consoled by. What, in
fact, is a horror story? And what
does it do? First the latter.

The horror story does the work
of a certain kind of dream we all
know. Sometimes it does this so
well that even the most irrational
and unlikely subject matter can in
feet the reader with a sense of
realism beyond the realistic, a trick
usually not seen outside the vaude-
ville of sleep. When is the last time
you failed to be fooled by a night
mare, didn't suspend disbelief be-
cause its incidents weren't suffi-
ciently true-to-life 7 The horror
story is only true to dreams, espe-
cially those which involve us in
mysterious ordeals, the passing of
secrets, the passages of forbidden
knowledge, and, in more ways than
one, the spilling of guts.

What distinguishes horror from
other kinds of stories is the exclu
sive devotion of their practitioners,
their true practitioners, to self-
consciously imagining and isolating
the most demonic aspects and epi-
sodes of human existence, undimin-
ished by any consolation whatever.
For here no consolation on earth is
sufficient to the horrors it will
struggle in vain to make bearable.

Are horror stories truer than
other stories? They may be, but
not necessarily. They are limited

to depicting conditions of extraordi-
nary suffering, and while this is
not the only game in town, such
depictions can be as close to truth
as any others. Nevertheless, what
simple fictional horror- no matter
how grossly magnified can ever
hold a candle to the complex mesh
of misery and disenchantment which
is merely the human routine? Of
course the fundamental horror of
existence is not always apparent to
us, its constantly menaced but un-
wary existers. But in true horror
stories we can see it even in the
dark. All eternal hopes, optimistic
outs, and ultimate redemptions are
cleared away, and for a little while
we can pretend to stare the very
worst right in its rotting face.

Why, though? Why?

Just to do it, that's all. Just to
see how much unmitigated weird-
ness. sorrow, desolation, and cos-
mic anxiety the human heart can
take and still have enough heart
left over to translate these agonies
into artistic forms: James' stained-

glass monstrosities, Lovecraft's nar-
row-passaged blasphemies, Poe's
symphonic paranoia. As in any
satisfying relationship, the creator
of horror and its consumer approach
oneness with each other. In other
words, you get the horrors you
deserve, those you can understand.
For contrary to conventional wis-
dom, . you can not be frightened by
what you don't understand.

This, then, is the ultimate, that
is only, consolation: simply that

someone shares some of your own
feelings and has made of these a
work of art which you have the
insight, sensitivity, and — like or
not -peculiar set of experiences to
appreciate. Amazing thing to say,
the consolation of horror in art is
that it actually intensifies our panic,
loudens it on the sounding-board of
our horror-hollowed hearts, turns
terror up full blast, all the while
reaching for that perfect and deaf-
ening amplitude at which we may
dance to the bizarre music of our
own misery.

Hallowmas 1989 / 99

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Canada, M6R 1E6

w e buy and sell Arkham, Berkley, Cape, Dobson, Doubleday,
Faber, Gnome, Gollancz, Grant, Grosset, Hodder, Hutchinson,
Kimber, Little Brown, MacDonald, Phantasia, Random,
Scream, Scribners, Underwood, Viking, Whispers - - Crypt Of
Clhulhu, Drumm, Fawcett, Necronomicon, Pardoe, spectre,
Strange Co., - - Aldiss, Anderson, Ballard, Bloch, Brennen,
Campbell, Derleth, Ellison, Farmer, Howard, King, Long,
Moorcock, Niven, Smith, Straub, Vance, Wellman, etc., etc. . .

w e have also published selected works by H. P. Lovecraft,
plus Lovecraft criticism and bibliographies. At The Root, Cats
And Dogs, The Materialist Today, FuBar, Les Bibliotheques,
and Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Books 4. etc., etc., etc

1“ orthcoming items include: William Hope Hodgson: A
Bibliography of Books and Periodical Appearances. Clark
Ashton Smith: The Books. Les Bibliotheques, etc., etc., etc

Send For Free Catalogue

50 / Crypt of Cthulhu

Review

R’lyeh

Steve Behrends with Donald Sid-
ney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman, eds.
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected

Fi ction and jissays of Clark Ashton
Smit h ■ Greenwood Press (88 Post
Road, Westport, CT 06881 ), 1989,

281 pp. $39.95.

(Reviewed by Stefan Dziemianowicz )

Any review of the collected mar
ginalia of Clark Ashton Smith that
appears in a magazine devoted to
the work of H. P. Lovecraft must
be written with certain audience
factors in mind: first, that there

are many diehard Lovecraftians who
can't abide Smith's work, or who
find it greatly inferior to Love-
craft's; and second, that many
Lovecraftians who admire Smith's
fiction have little interest in the
arcana of Smith scholarship. If you
fall into either of these groups,
then S trange S hadows is not a book
for you.

If, however, you are the type of
reader who approaches Smith's work
with the same spirit of scholarly
curiosity that motivated Love
craftians to purchase H. P. Love -
craft: A Commonplace Book or the

five volumes of Lovecraft^ Selec ted
Letters , and in particular if you
are someone who owns a copy of
The Black Book of C I ark Ash ton
Smith or who bought "The Unex-
purgated Clark Ashton Smith" se-
ries from Necronomicon Press, then
Stra nge Shadows is an indispensable
addition to your library. Quite
simply, it is the best edited and
organized book of Smith's writing
published yet. It ys expensively
priced (although no more— and in
some cases much less- so than any
other Greenwood Press book), but
the cost reflects both Greenwood
Press' guality production values and
the considerable research that has
gone into the collation and annota-
tion of the text.

Fditor Steve Behrends bills the
book as a collection of Smith's "ex
tant previously unpublished prose"
and, with the exception of his juve

nilia. "the final addition to this
major fantaisiste's body of fiction."
Actually, some of these selections
were published in obscure sources
during Smith's lifetime, as well as
in issues 26 and 27 of Crypt of
Cthulhu (which carried a handful of
the stories and synopses and an
early incarnation of "The Lost Worlds
of Clark Ashton Smith," Behrends'
valuable appendix on Smith's lost
fiction), but this is the first time
they have been collected and ar-
ranged in chronological order (where
Smith's dating would allow) for easy
access. Excluding the notes and
the three appendices (Behrends 1
article, the first draft of the CAS
Don Carter collaboration, "The
Nemesis of the Unfinished," and
several pages of addenda for The
Black Book ), the book's contents
are divided into four major sections:
"Fantastic Fiction," "Non-Fantastic
Fiction," "Prose Poems and Plays"
and "Miscellaneous Non-Fiction and
Prose." The fantastic fiction sec-
tion comprises roughly two-thirds of
St range Sh adows, and is itself sub-
divided into another seven sections.
Since the contents are not meant to
cohere or represent anything more
than a collection of fugitive pieces
that appeared at different points in
Smith's career, the only realistic
way to give an idea of what the
book offers is to discuss each sec-
tion's merits.

Completed Stories (5). These
five stories, written between 1931
and 1961, show off Smith's artistic
palette in its every hue. "A Good
Embalmer" is a cartoonist) shocker
that even Smith admitted was "un-
characteristic" for him. "Nemesis
of the Unfinished" is one of his
rare collaborations. In the best
entry, "Double Cosmos," Smith ex-
plores the same theme he used in
"The Chain of Aforgomon," "Xee
thra" and many other stories: the

revelation that our world is a fallen,
or subordinate, manifestation of a
more exotic dimension. "Strange
Shadows" (ultimately retitled "I Am

Hallowmas 1989 / 51

Your Shadow") is at one and the
same time fascinating and frustrat-
ing. Smith hoped to sell it to Un
known . a magazine that consciously
avoided publishing the kind of
fantasy that appeared in Weird
Tales and, indeed, the story is full
of the type of dry wit that Unknown
editor John W. Campbell enjoyed.
However, because the tale is not
written in Smith's usual florid style,
it exposes a weakness one tends to
overlook in his more effusive fan-
tasies: lack of plot. Smith must

have realized this, for he revised
the tale twice, adding a little bit
more to the story line each time.
With each successive revision,
though, the story gradually became
a W eird Tales -type story. Smith
completed “The Dart of Rasasfa"
only months before he died and long
after his most creative years were
past. It would be nice to say his
career ended with a bang, but the
final evidence doesn't bear this out.
Granted, Smith wrote the story to
accompany cover art already com-
missioned for Fantastic , and so had
to incorporate specific images he
might never have used were the
story completely his own creation.
Nevertheless, "Dart" is a silly space
opera from the Wonder Stories
school, a type of fiction that was
long out of vogue by 1962.

Variant Versions of Published
Stories (3). "In the Book of Ver-
gaina" is a three-paragraph prelude
lopped from "The Last Hieroglyph."
The version of "The Coming of the
White Worm" published here is
slightly longer than the one that
appeared in Stirring Science Storie s
in 1941 . Smith altered both of these
stories on his own and the changes
he made do not greatly affect the
works as they were published.
However, he also altered "The Beast
of Averoigne" after the version
published here was rejected by
Weird Tales , and the damage is sig-
nificant. Smith had planned to tell
the story from three different points
of view. By cutting 1400 words
and limiting the narrative to the
Particular point of view he settled
°n, he robbed the story of its

mystery and much of its human in-
terest .

Fragmentary Stories with Accom-
panying Synopses (5) and Fragmen-
tary Stories (14). Several of these
fragments are developed just enough
to leave the reader wondering how
they might have turned out. Of the
first group. "The Master of De-
struction" (1931) is interesting for
opening with a scene similar to the
climax of Lovecraft's "The Shadow
out of Time." The two most prom-
ising entries, though, are "Asharia,"
with its subtheme of an eternal in-
terplanetary war, and "The Music
of Death," a moody descent into the
Gothic mode. "The Infernal Star"
is the most interesting item of the
second group, mostly for its bulk-
10, 000 words (hardly a fragment!) —
and for the fact that Smith appeared
to be using it as a stockpot for
names and places from the Lovecraft
Mythos and his own story cycles.
Curiously, out of all the plotted
but uncompleted stories in these two
sections, all but two or three are
earthbound adventures or space
operas, leaving one to wonder if
Smith didn't compose his more ex-
otic fantasies more spontaneously.

Synopses (97). Smith's story
ideas run from single sentences to
several pages in length. He wrote
down the majority of those included
here between 1929 and 1932, and
the ones he ultimately developed
into stories are worth comparing to
the final product. The brief entry
for "The Supernumerary Corpse,"
for example— "A man dies, and
leaves two corpses, in two different
places"— gives no indication of how
Smith would turn this plot germ
into a Poe-esque horror story fo-
cused on the tortured psyche of a
murderer who cannot account for
his victim's two corpses. Before
writing his tale of Averoigne, "The
Disinterment of Venus," it appears
that Smith altered the synopsis so
that the buried statue of the title
would be found by monks excavat-
ing monastery ground, rather than
peasants tilling a turnip field— a
crucial change that made the story's
sexual undercurrent seem much

5 2 / Crypt of Cthulhu

more subversive. "The Nameless
Offspring" is considered by many
to be one of Smith's more gruesome
stories, but its synopsis shows the
climax of the published story to be
milder than Smith had originally
planned it. One of Smith's more
interesting transformations can be
traced through the notes that ulti-
mately led to his writing "The Light
from Beyond." As the story idea
progresses from the synopsis "The
Burial Place of the Unknown" to
"The Cairn," we see Smith tinkering
with two of his favorite themes— the
discovery of a gateway to another
world, and the sensory derange
ment experienced by someone trans
planted from our world to a more
exotic environment. However, some-
time between writing the synopsis
"The Cairn (New Finding)" and the
published story. Smith decided not
to have his artist narrator come
back insane, but to have him re-
turn unable to paint anymore. By
doing so, he transformed a routine
pulp fantasy into what might be in-
terpreted as a commentary on the
artist's need to keep his imagination
at arm's length.

Fantastic Titles and Fantastic
Names. These are hundreds of
proper names and story titles Smith
jotted down between 1929 and 1930.
Most were never used, suggesting
that Smith was more attracted to
their poetic sound than intent on
turning them into fiction.

Non Fantastic Fiction (8). This
section is interesting mostly be-
cause the writing is surprisingly
bad. "The Parrot" is a good at-
tempt at a murder mystery that dis
sipates too early what should have
been a surprise ending. The re
maining pieces are trite tearjerkers
or love stories that Smith probably
wrote with specific pulp markets in
mind — proof that he could hack with
the best of them.

Prose Poems and Plays (12). All
of the prose poems included here
have been collected into Necronomi-
con Press' Nostalgi a of the Un -
known. The showpiece is "The
Dead Will Cuckhold You," a praise-
worthy verse drama that reads a

little like Byron by way of Swin-
burne.

Miscellaneous and Non-Fiction
Prose (6). There is one gem
amongst these brief notes and in-
troductions: "Cigarette Characteri-

sation," in which Smith uses Smith-
ian hyperbole to describe the plea-
sures of a lit cigarette. Obviously,
he was not above poking fun at
himself.

If I've given the impression that
much of the material in Strange
Shado ws is lacking in intrinsic
merit, it is not without cause. This
is not the sort of book one turns
to for an evening of entertainment
or even an introduction to Smith's
writing. It is a reference book,
and it will be of greatest interest
to those doing Smith research or
those already familiar with his fic-
tion. A good deal of the book's
value lies in Steve Behrends' de
tailed notes and annotations, which
not only reveal otherwise unknown
information about Smith's creative
and personal life, but also forge
connections between works that
Smith aficionados may have over-
looked. My only cavil — that some of
the more obvious items (the synop-
ses for "Ubbo Sathla," "The Double
Shadow" and other ideas which
eventually became published) are
not annotated — is small when mea-
sured against the full scholarly
achievement of Strange Shadows .
Years from now, this will still be an
invaluable source book for Smith
studies .

MAIL" CAl.l. (from page 91)
after Lovecraft died, Leiber was to
write his brilliant novel Conjure
Wife (which probably owes a small
but significant debt to Lovecraft's
"Dreams in the Witch House"), in
which a too rigid skepticism almost
results in the death of Norman and
Tansy Saylor from "occult" forces.
Would that Lovecraft had lived long
enough to see this tale published!

I think he would have been as-
tounded by the originality of Lei-
ber's approach.

--Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

Hallowmas 1989 / 53

MAIL-CALL OF CTHULHU

Crypt #30 and #48 included some
favorable comments about the psy-
chedelic folk-rock albums "H. P.
Lovecraft" (1967) and "H. P. Love-
craft II" (1968), issued by the
Philips label.

These two albums have been re
issued by a British label, Edsel
Records, a division of Demon Rec-
ords Ltd., as a double album: "H.
P. Lovecraft — At The Mountains Of
Madness," DED256, reasonably priced
for an import at about $16.

- Steve Benner, Roslyn, PA

Do women read horror fiction and
critical commentary on the genre?
Do women write the stuff? How much
of it do they write, and how many
of them read it? And — is what they
write any good ?

These questions have been de-
bated in the letters column of Cryp t
of C thulhu for a while now. Moved
to comment, the wonder is that I've
been able to keep still for so long.

Jessica Salmonson ( Crypt #51 )
charges that women are underrepre-
sented in Crypt . Editor Robert Price
maintains that "the representation
of women and men both among read-
ers and writers of Crypt reflects
the proportionate interest of both
sexes rather than magnifying the
one at the expense of the other."

Proportionate representation,
however, is not what Salmonson
has in mind: "The hoary excuse

'I wasn't sent anything by women'
is not sufficient," she writes.
Charging that "subconsciously or
otherwise, an editor has to try
mighty hard to feature so few wom-
en," Salmonson says that it is in-
cumbent upon editors to seek out
women writers in this field.

But if "Story by Woman" is spe-
cifically sought, instead of "Best
Story Available," good writers will
be neglected, readers will be de-
nied the best fiction, and women of
integrity will have to wonder if
their work appeared because of its
intrinsic merit or because some
quota was being met.

(I'm not saying that "Best Story"
is never "Story by Woman." It
often is. But pick by literary
standards, not gender quotas.)

The fungi hit the fan, though,
with Pierre Comtois' pair of letters
( Crypt #55 and #63). Comtois cites
the greater number of men than
women reading and writing horror
fiction. This is, perhaps, verifiable
statistical stuff (although Darrell
Schweitzer marshalls some stats
about Ni ght Cry 's readership in
refutation). Comtois continues:

Far from being anti women in
its choice of writers. Crypt
really does reflect the vast gap
between the number of male to
female readers in HPL-related
fare. Personally I've never met
a single female who took the
slightest interest in the genre .

. . (The] configuration of the

SF/Fantasy sections of any book
store with their preponderance
of female-written fantasy novels
and Star Trek adventures, lead
me to conclude that most female
readers' interests lie in a direc-
tion completely opposed to the
interests of HPL enthusiasts. .

The few female writers in the
field are the exception, but
when one considers they make
up a tiny fraction of the read-
ers, and thus of those inspired
to write . . .

And he goes on (and on), never
deciding if he is discussing female
writers or female readers . What
is the point here: that because

some women writers have turned
out fantasy and Star Trek novels,
this is what most women buy and
read? Vastly more people read
than write, after all. and many
read books written by members of
the opposite sex.

Comtois claims that he is "point-
ing out obvious reading trends in
the general population." but the
fantasy section of some bookstore,
and his own lack of acquaintance
with any woman interested in the

54 / Crypt of Cthulhu

horror genre, scarcely constitute
a representative sample of the
"general population" or of the read-
ing public.

Far from dealing with general
tendencies, Comtois is very specific
indeed. He selects certain genres,
pronounces most of the authors fe-
male and assumes a female reader-
ship (not demonstrated or sup
ported), then concludes . . . uh,

he concludes . . . well, something .
surely. That this is what women
read instead of horror fiction, per-
haps? Again — not demonstrated, not
supported .

Ros Calverley (Cryjat 61)) notes
that Comtois cites women writers in
genres other than horror. Comtois
insists that he knows the difference
between horror and Sword and Sor-
cery. Maybe so, but this is not

demonstrated in his pair of letters.
Comtois claims that "the females on
the whole fail in horror writing
when compared with the males." He
goes on immediately to cite C. L.
Moore, the Women of Wonder anthol-
ogy, and to refer to the "derivative
and dull material on the SF book-
stalls," all of which is quite apart
from the point.

Both Calverley and Schweitzer
(Cr ypt 61)) list a number of nota-
ble women horror writers. Comtois
maintains that he is "quite familiar
with many of the writers listed . .

. having read them many years ago;

I wasn't impressed with them then,
and I certainly won't waste time
with them now."

This is an extraordinarily frank
admission of inflexibility. I shall
certainly do Comtois the courtesy of
accepting at face value the rigid
and narrow-minded persona he
chooses to present, but I am puz-
zled about the attitude that under-
lies such an assertion. Is Comtois
proud that his tastes and critical
perceptions have developed not at
all in lo these "many years"? It
looks as if Schweitzer nailed it when
he said that Comtois dismisses all
women writers of horror because he
does not like any of them.

No possible benefit can accrue
from pre judging a work of literature

based upon the author's sex. How
ever, this is not to say that sex is
irrelevant. To maintain, as Tani
Jantsang does ( Crypt 64), that it is
a manifestation of "insecurities
about lone's) OWN sexuality" (em-
phasis Jantsang's] to even notice
authorial gender is absurd and in-
defensible .

Susan Michaud states ( Crypt
61)): "There are as many differ-

ences between men's and women's
writings as there are between men
and women. These differences have
to do with nature as well as nur-
ture, and they are what essentially
makes life interesting."

There are indeed differences.
The ability to write well is not one
of them.

Horror remains a field of limited
appeal. Among the general reading
public, few read horror fiction;
fewer still read the attendant body
of criticism. Of this small number,
fewer females than males participate.
And so what? Surely the wider ap-
peal to one sex of a literary genre
is a morally neutral, and not a bad
thing. Are those women who do
write in this genre as skillful as
the men who do so? Yes, of course.

Jessica Salmonson's call for a
special place to be made for women
in horror could easily lead to the
development of a nice genteel ghetto
for women writers, singled out and
judged by a separate set of stan-
dards— assessed as "Woman Horror
Writer" instead of simply "Horror
Writer," or better yet, as "Writer."

Comtois is welcome to dislike
the work of any damned writer he
pleases, but his preferences are
clearly divided on gender lines, and
fly in the face of popular and crit-
ical consensus. He cannot be so
disingenuous as to expect this to
go unremarked.

Oh, yeah— "popular and critical
consensus," airily dismissed by so
many contributors to this debate.
It's silly to deny affinities with any
group. Why insist so strenuously
that one's opinion if nonrepresenta-
tive?— thus rendering it pretty
valueless in a discussion of trends
and tendencies.

Hallowmas 1989 / 55

"My, what a firestorm in a tea-
cup I started," Comtois writes bland
ly in Crypt 63, as if surprised by
the controversy that followed his
provocative statements. Surely he
expected this "war of words" to
erupt. I hope he's enjoying and
possibly even reflecting upon it, as
I am .

-Marie Lazzari, Northville, Ml

I find that a good argument has
somewhat of a rejuvenative effect on
my prose and must, therefore,
henceforth communicate not in the
accents of him your Mr. Lovecraft
refers to as "the Old Pretender,"
but rather at the dictates of the
daemon Clarity.

Those who question my use of
the word "bearded" as though I had
confused Mr. Arnold's muttonchop
whiskers for the fuller article of
facial growth are admonished to
open their copies of the 1971 OED,
that available to my transcriber, and
peruse the definitions there sup-
plied for "beard" and "bearded."
They may find of particular interest
that definition of "bearded" which
implies a setting "at defiance, a
thwarting, an affront." In a vain
attempt of subtlety I referred not
only to the "effect" of Mr. Arnold's
rapidly moving, muttonchopped jaws
near the outward surface of my ear,
but the "intent," partly suggested
by tone and rhythm, of the words
thus spoken.

I am reminded that Dagon is a
god of the Philistines, whom Mr.
Arnold is forever deriding. Surely,
Mr. Lovecraft would not have his
followers mistake the behavior of
the worshippers for study of the
god. — Henry James

Crypt seems of two minds: is

Lumley a wanker or isn't he? Well,

I used to quite a lot . . . but I

was just a boy then and soon dis-
covered women. I'm glad Dziemian-
owicz (Jesus, talk about Cthulhu
being hard to pronounce!) finally
found something of mine that he
likes. The Necr oscope books, I
"lean; or more specifically WamphyrU
Hopefully he'll like Nec ros cope III:

The Source , IV: Deadspeak , and V :
Deadspawn just as much. But if
not . . . well, you can't please ev-
eryone all the time. The last two
will be the end of it. (And, inci-
dentally, the first two in the series
have recently been reprinted in
UK. )

But it seems I should say a word
or two about the Hero books (Hero
of Dr eams . Ship of D reams. Mad
Moon , etc.). And about Burrowers .
First let me say that Dzie— can I
call him Dizzy?- that Dizzy's review
of Bu rrowers got the closest to the
real me and my intentions than any
other before it. It was like he read
my mind. I applaud it because I
know he read this one. But let me
also say of his answer to Paul Can-
ley's letter that he's wrong.

The trouble with a lot of Love-
craft "experts" is that they aren't;
usually they only remember it the
way they want to, not the way it
is. Or they've read the stuff so
often that it just doesn't make any
impression any more. I'm not say-
ing Dizzy is deliberately misleading,
just that his memory is faulty.

I have to hand it to the most re-
cent Arkham Dunwich Horro r £ Co. ,
p. 139, a third oT the way down
the page:

"They worshipped, so they said,
the Great Old Ones who lived ages
before there were any men, and who
came to the young world out of the
sky. Those Old Ones were gone
now, inside the earth and under the
sea; but tjieir dead bodies had told
thei r secrets in dr eams to the first
men , who formed a cult whic h had
never died ■ This was that cult,
and the prisoners said it had al-
always existed and always would
exist, hidden in distant wastes and
dark places all over the world until
the time . when the great priest
Cthulhu, from his dark house in
the mighty city of R'lyeh under the
waters, should rise and bring the
earth again beneath his sway. Some
day he would call . when the stars
were ready . and the secret cult
would always be wai ting to liberate
him . "

Quite obviously,

Wilcox and

56 / Crypt of Cthulhu

others of that ilk, and the cultists,
have heard his call. He has spoken
to them in dreams. I mean, the
story is called "The Call ot Cthu-
lhu," after all!

On the next page we learn that
there are arts which can revive
the Great Old Ones. So now we
know why Cthulhu bothers to chat
telepathically with mere people: to

pass on the spells which can raise
him up from R'lyeh. But . . . if I
haven't made the point clearly
enough, HPL himself makes it at
bottom of page 1 40 :

". . . some force from outside

must serve to liberate Their bodies.
The spells that preserved Them in-
tact likewise prevented Them from
making an initial move, and They
could only lie awake in the dark
and think whilst uncounted millions
of years rolled by. They knew all
that was occurring in the universe,
for Their mode of speech was
tra nsmitted thought ■ Even now
They talked in Their tombs . When,
after infinities of chaos, the first

men came, the Gr eat Old Ones s poke
to the sensitive among the m by
moulding their d reams ; for only
thus co uld the ir language reach
the fleshly minds of mammals . ~ T" -

And so on. Page 141 is full of
it, too.

So you see, you're wrong. Dizzy.
You asked a question: "Do the Old

Ones contact human beings or send
dreams to them in "The Call of
Cthulhu"? Yes. But don't take my
word for it, read the story. It's a
reviewer's duty after all. Mean-
while, I'll condense it for you:

Cthulhu sent dreams to reinforce
the spells of his secret priests and
warn them of his imminence. The
sensitives overhear d his dream
sendings and some cracked up
(why, some were so badly affected
they couldn't even remember the
%*?@$4 story!).

Now, there are those who'll ar-
gue black is white. I once saw two
guys in a Sgt.'s Mess decide a
heated argument by tossing a coin .

. . and then argue that they'd both

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Hallowmas 1989 / 57

called heads! But there is no ar-
gument here. Whether my story
w as a good or bad one and liked or
loathed isn't the point; what is the
point is that Ganley is right, and
no amount of waffle can disprove it.
Lovecraft wrote what he wrote, and
even in the "revised" or "corrected"
version it's still writ. Be warned.
Dizzy; even folks who try to re-
write HPL come on hard times, but
people who would unwrite him get
gobbled up by nameless things . . .

To write a definite finis on all
this, on page 197 there's the nar
rator totting up all the damnable
information ;

"What of all this— and of those
hints of old Castro about the sunk-
en, star-born Old Ones and their
coming reign; their faithful cult and
their mastery of dreams ?" And
those are Lovecraft's Ttalics this
time . . .

About the Dreamlands books.

Just like I loved everything
Lovecraftian , I loved his dream-
lands. Marvellous, fantastic crea-
tion. And others who used the
setting tried (I think) to stick to
the Lovecraft formula. Myers and
Carter, for example. They tried ,
anyway. But I have trouble relat-
ing to people who faint at the hint
of a bad smell. A meep or glibber
doesn't cut it with me. (I love
meeps and glibbers, don't get me
wrong, but go looking for what
made them!) That's the main dif-
ference between my stories in that
setting and HPL's. My guys fight
back. Also, they like to have a
laugh along the way.

I give you an example from life:

I did a little service in Malta.
There are Crusader remains (and
how!) in Malta. There are wonder-
ful buildings, there's history, there
are lessons to be learned, a lot to
take in. But my mind doesn't run
to learning alj^ the time. HPL has
Randolph Carter sitting in a tavern
bstening to the mournful songs of
salty old sea-dogs. Me 7 I was
down Straight Street (called "The
t j ut" by every sailor who ever was)
listening to the Beatles, drinking
f-hisk. Hop Leaf and Blue Label

and ogling the girlies!

I was in places HPL wouldn't
ever go. Now the dreamlands are
made from the dreams of men, and
it takes all types. So the back
ground is the same but the d ream
is different ! My guys hang out in
the Craven Lobster or Buxom Bar-
ba's Quayside Quaress. And the
things they get up to and the quests
they go on can't be too farfetched!
Hell, Randolph Carter passed from
the moon to the dreamlands in a
leap of cats !

Point made, I hope.

Headline Books UK will be doing
the series in mass paperback start-
ing in August. The jackets are
quite beautiful.

Crypt is good but expensive. If

I didn't get complimentary copies

I'd go broke. But there again I'd

get a lot more payin g writing done,

tOO ... oil

— Brian Lumley

Devon, England

PS: Where was the Darrell Schweit-

zer letter? Maybe like me and
Cthulhu he wonders if he's getting
through, if there's anyone out
there hearing his call?

PPS : And maybe like me and Cthu-

lhu he doesn't really give a twopen
ny toss anyway.

PPPSS: Someone recently remarked

in Crypt on pearls before swine and
a kingdom of literary heaven. On
the same subject, a lot of camels
will leap nimbly through the eye of
the needle before this turkey!

Don Burleson's admirably re-
strained and reasoned letter in
Crypt #64 is an absolute model of
how to respond to one's critics. I
only wish all other combatants in
literary controversies could manage
to be so decent. Don sticks to the
issues, which is what all of us
should do. A literary argument,
no matter how heated, must never
become personal. I was afraid there
for a while that I'd been riding him
a bit hard. If this becomes gen-
uinely acrimonious. I'll drop the
whole subject.

That being so, I can't say lie's

58 / Crypt of Cthulhu

convinced me. He is of course
right that I know very little about
Structuralism and related doctrines,
and I have not read all those books
lie lists. But he is like a devout
astrologer insisting that one can't
really judge astrology without
studying vast mounds of astrologi-
cal lore for many years.

Most of us don't do that. The
reason is that we're not convinced
that astrology has any validity at
all. It doesn't produce results.
Scientific medicine, on the other
hand, does. It too requires years
of study, but one might be moti-
vated to spend all those years be-
cause the results -the validity of
the discipline— are plain for all to
see .

The problem with Structuralism
is that it doesn't have anything to
show. I can't think of a single
valid insight to come out of Don's
various analyses, or, for that mat-
ter, various speeches and articles
by Samuel Delany. I have never
come across anything which makes
me say, "Wow! I want to learn to
do that."

What I have seen is a lot of,
yes, gibberish, and frequently
ludicrous attempts to ignore the ob-
vious and arrive at the most absurd
conclusions. I also see what I can
only take as supreme arrogance:
advocates of one school of criticism
declaring all others evermore obso-
lete. and then demanding that ev
eryone learn an arcane jargon which,
indeed, no other school of criticism
requires .

My only reply to that is that I
don't need a glossary to read Ed-
mund Wilson. I don't regard this
as a shortcoming on Wilson's part.

One shrewd critic I know sug-
gested that maybe there really
some knowledge to be gained from
Structuralism, but that Burleson
and Delany are doing ^t wrong ■

Maybe so. Unless we get the
first intelligible Structuralist, this
is all going to be lost, either laughed
down or yawned down, whichever
comes first. Some college English
teachers I know tell me that in the
conventional academic world. Struc-

turalism is almost dead. It is a fad
whose time has passed. Wouldn't it
be exquisitely ironic if our little
province harbored the last living
structuralist, a kind of literary
passenger pigeon? But it would
also be ironic— and a tragic waste
of a talented writer's time— if once
Don has finished his Structuralist
book on HPL, the whole silly fad is
so obsolete that no one will publish
it.

The Delany speech I was refer-
ring to, by the way, is being serial-
ized in The New York Review of
Science Fi ction . It still doesn't make
any sense. Once in a while there
are glimmerings, as if it'll all come
into focus, but then it fades out
again .

Another loss, because Delany
used to be a fine critic and essay-
ist .

I will confess my own personal
bias in all this, the fiction writer's
inherent suspicion of critical theory.
Structuralism is an extreme example,
but critical theory as a rule is only
of interest to other theorists. It
has nothing to do with literature,
either as it is created (esp ecially as
it is created!) or as it is enjoyed.

On the subject of further silli-
ness, Will Murray is entirely miss-
ing the point in his article on the
film of "The Whisperer in Dark-
ness." He would have us believe
this is a real movie. No, it is a

strictly amateur film, shot with a
home movie camera. His article is
the equivalent of professional sports
criticism applied to the Special
Olympics .

I saw The Whisperer in Darkness
about the time it was made. I may
have even seen the premiere, in
Ben Indick's living room, at a gath-
ering of fans back around 1975 or
so. As I recall, it was shown on a
home-movie projector. (VCRs hadn't
been invented yet. I am surprised,
by the way, that someone actually
took the trouble to transfer this
thing to videotape.) One of the
perpetrators I think it was David
C. Smith, that same Smith who has
written some Red Sonia novels with
Richard Tierney — was present, and

Hallowmas 1989 / 59

explaining how this and that aspect
of the film were done.

I remember that the Old Ones
looked like someone in a cardboard
box waving cardboard wings. I re-
member too that the only sound was
the tape-recording J. Vernon Shea
makes when interviewing the bustles.

But I also remember that the film
was actually well received by its
audience. It seemed, in its own
way, more faithful to the spirit of
Lovecraft than any of the profes-
sional films. Everyone there under-
stood that this was to be regarded
the same way you would a high
school play, or a film which a hand-
ful of fans made with a home-movie
camera in their back yard— which is
largely what it was.

Of cour se nobody in it went on
to have real screen careers, any-
more than I did after playing major
supporting roles in Dark Shadows
Unde r the Eyes (a mad etymologist
who tries to impale the benight-
gowned, candle-toting heroine on
an insect pin) and The La st Days
ot Sodom and G omorrah (the Angel
of the Lord, and also, at the end,
the Hand of the Lord, seen to
strike and apply a match to the
cut-out city of Gomorrah). I bet
you didn't know this secret, dark
chapter of my past ... Of course
not. They were films a friend of
mine made for a college film course.
They have not been, alas, in gen-
eral release. We didn't win any
Oscars .

The Whispe rer in D arkn ess is on
the same level. Another rare Love-
craft film, with considerably more
pretensions, but hardly any better,
is The Music of Erich Zann . It is
hard to forget the awesome cosmic
belly-dancer . . .

— Darrell Schweitzer, Strafford, PA

It's been a number of years since
I've been reading your publication,
and, lo! I must say that your last
effort in #68 has forced me to give
you folks a letter of congratulations.
Wow! A knockout! I can see rings
of Lovecraftians dancing about in
circles with joy over this one. The
R'lyeh Review, which is always in-

formative and exciting, was even
more so. The verses by Mr. Tierney
and Mr. Schweitzer gave me a much
needed chuckle in the advent of
college finals.

And Mail Call? Mail Call is open
ing into an even broader and com-
plex forum for our fellow readers.
Not satisfied to delve into mere
trivia over whether "old Grandpa"
sounded like Mickey Mouse or not,
the Crypt readers are conversing
over the roles of women and men in
weird fiction and "deconstruction-
ism" and such. And they do so in-
telligently without losing their good
sense of humor. All so exciting! I
can only expect that it will only
open up more controversy in the
future. Everyone give yourself a
pat on the back for a job well done.

By the way, may I also congrat-
ulate Donald Burleson (look Don, a
compliment!) for his outstanding
letter of response to his criticism of
late. He handled his remarks with
remarkable professionalism and,
even more surprising, clarity. The
critics do, after all, have a good
point. I must say, that despite the
interest he generates in his topics
and ideas, his effect is somewhat
diminished by his exceptionally dry
prose. Now, it seems if he carried
out his articles just a little bit
looser, as in his last letter, I be-
lieve people would react with much
more enthusiasm to his intelligent
and well-informed commentary. Re
gardless, however people might have
written about Mr. Burleson in the
past, I hope no one will deny that
his ideas and essays are, as always,
warmly welcomed and appreciated
by the readers. Cheers, Don, and
well done!

The Herbert West installments
were even better than expected. It
was a constant joy to see the plot
twist from here to there and back
again. Of late, I can think of no
other Crypt fiction which has
brought me so much delight and
surprise. I think, though, that
Mr. Cannon may have a Melville ob-
session developing as of late. I was
quite surprised NOT to see a "Great
White Beast" sloshing off in the

60 / Crypt of Cthulhu

bog's distance. At any rate, the
entire series was carried out won-
derfully, and I believe should be
included, wherever possible, beside
the master's original episodes.
Bravo! Everyone rise and give the
fellows enthusiastic applause.

The mag's cover art is getting
much better, thanks to the current
patch of contributing artists. There
were times in the past, I must con-
fess, when I was rather embar-
rassed to be seen walking around
with it, but now that seems to be
a solved problem.

Finally, there is a certain ques-
tion which has been nagging me for
quite some time. I was wondering
if there was any sort of secret code
designated to the coloring of the
covers. One month pink, the next
yellow, and after that another yel-
low. Is this some evil plot? Some
damned intrusion by the forces of
the nether dimensions? Or is it in
fact, pure chance, decided merely
on the aesthetic qualities of color
combined with the artwork? But
somehow that last explanation is too
simple, too pat, to be the truth of
it all. No, there is something darker
at hand here, and I'm certain that,
as editors of this malevolent publi-
cation. you'll probably ignore this
letter, or edit it during the print-
ing or respond with some baldfaced,
inhuman, demonic lie. But I must
warn you, we, the readers, are on
to you! Beware you devils! Pre-
pare to be blasted back to whence
you came! — Krishna C. Sherman
San Francisco, CA

Wow, these last two issues cer-
tainly followed each other closely.

I really enjoy'd #65. Will's ar-
ticle seem'd a bit too cruel to some-
thing that was obviously an amateur
production created by fans. I re-
member thinking it a hoot that
Vernon Shea was in the film. He
had very strong links to Lovecraft
fandom at the time, so it is not
surprising that he was in the film.
Will must remember that for those
of us who were young starry-eyed
Lovecraft fans, to know someone
who had corresponded with HPL was
a kick in ye behind. "The Whis
perer in Darkness" was Shea's fa-
vorite Lovecraft tale, and tie was
highly amused to star as Akeley.
Vernon had no pretentions about
the film, and described it as "crude"
in his letters to me, saying that the
cast was "cruddy." Vernon had just
finished writing his own screenplay
version of "Thing on the Doorstep"
at the time, which I never got to
read. Whatever this fannish film
lacks, and I'm certain it must be
quite lacking, it was a sincere at-
tempt by Lovecraft tans to film
HPL. That point was completely
overlook'd by Will, and it should
be pointed out. Sincerity in mat
ters Lovecraftian is important to
me. (Also, Will is mistaken in say-
ing that Shea was publish'd in
Weirdy Ta l es . )

"Fun Guys" was a delight. I was
overjoy'd to read that someone else
loved "The Outsider," as it's one of
my favorite HPL yarns, and I've
always hated how so many people

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dismiss it as a minor story.

David's wee piece on Tremaine
wa s wonderful, and I admire how
there are people out there who are
dedicated to setting records correct
and giving people their due. Justice
is a great and valuable thing.

Mr. Brower's article was inter-
esting, but what I really enjoy'd
was how you preceded it with Li-
gotti's "The Voice in the Bones."
Thomas is the supreme Lovecraftian
surrealist .

I fear I found Eddy's tale some-
what dull. I rarely enjoy these
tales that begin with two tired old
men placidly discussing the wonders
and terrors of life. I cannot relate
to those kinds of characters, and if
I were to write such a tale one of
the men wou'd be applying vermilion
lipstick while the other carves
Lovecraftian adjectives into his
flesh .

-Wilum Pugmire, Seattle, WA

Just a note sparked off by Kevin
A. Ross' endorsement of Michael
Slade's Ghoul in Crypt #65.

My opinion, for what it's worth,
is that the book stinks. It strikes
me very much as a cynical attempt
to exploit the horror market by a
bunch of people ("Michael Slade" is
apparently three individuals, two of
whom are "Vancouver lawyers who
specialise in the field of criminal
insanity") who have two main rea-
sons for padding out their basic
slasher story with references to
popular horror writers and heavy
metal bands, i.e., (1) They will

gain credibility with the horror/rock
fan, who it seems is disturbingly
susceptible to the lure of name-
dropping; (2) They can promote
their moral distaste for both forms
of entertainment by linking it firmly
to psychopathic disorder and having
their hero proclaim at one point:
"In one way, horror stories, do rot
the brain."

As for the Mythos connection,
the authors base their curt expla-
nation of Where That Weird Guy
Lovecraft Was At entirely upon that
"quotation" which begins: "All my

s tories, unconnected though they

may be . . ." Need I say more'

If anyone else out there has read
Ghoul I'd be interested to hear
what they thought about it. For
those who haven't . . . well. I

think you catch my drift. Please
let's not encourage these people!

— Simon MacCulloch
Middlesex. England

Well, the 'ole bete noir is back
again. I was happy to read the
more conciliatory letter from Susan
Michaud in Crypt #65 even though
it was a sort of backhanded one.
She must not have referred to my
original letter in Crypt #55 when
she asked the question: "That

doesn't mean men are better than
women, does it?" Because in my
letter, I distinctly state "The odds
of good female writers to good male
writers must be the same" (as the
proportion of male to female readers
and thus those inspired to write)
"and so, with the limited publishing
opportunities we have, only the
very best get into print." Pretty
clear isn't it? I never said men
were better than women. In fact,
just the opposite, that they existed
in exactly equal proportions. The
rest of my letter was personal opin-
ion and acknowledged as so.

In answer to Mr. Dziemlanowicz'
request regarding my two or three
readable horror writers, I'd be glad
to oblige. Although I hope Mr. D.
(give me a break, writing your full
last name more than once in a letter
would probably break my fingers)
realizes that my figures were not
written in stone. Writers in horror
fiction that I enjoy reading fall into
two rough categories: the first are

the really good writers that I know
I'll enjoy no matter what, the sec-
ond are those that produce darn
good stories at a more leisurely
pace, missing the mark more often
than they hit it. Karl Edward Wag-
ner holds first place all by his
lonesome in my book, no two ways
about it; next would be T. E. D.
Klein whose short stories I invari-
ably enjoy (his novel. The Cere -
monies, read very well, but missed
the mark badly in its unrealistic

62 / Crypt of Cthulhu

depiction of a "good Catholic girl"
and the disappointing, anticlimactic
ending); and finally, a new addition
to my list, Thomas Ligotti who be-
gan with me as a bit of clunky
writer but who rapidly smoothed out
his style to become one of the peo-
ple whose work I anxiously look
forward to. Going through my
horror fiction shelf, I find that
truly, there are only these three I
can unequivocally recommend to
anyone. The second tier of writers
is a longer list: Eddy C. Bertin,

R. David Ludwig, Mark Rainey,
W. H. Eugmire, Robert Bloch, Ste-
phen King (!) (some of his short
stories), Henry J. Vester III, David
Daniel, to a lesser extent, Brian
l.umley and Ramsey Campbell. Then
there are a host of one shot, stab
in the dark writers, too numerous
to mention (or remember their
names). I admit my personal stan-
dards are exacting, preferring
genre fiction published before the
fifties because I think the writing
styles were more studied and con-
trolled .

-Pierre Comtois, Lowell, MA

Thanks for No. 66 of Crypt . I
was especially interested in the con-
versation with the late Edward Hoff-
mann Price. It is nice to know that
someone thinks we did not write
D ark Valley Destiny in order to
vilify Robert Howard.

About the incident Price relates
on page 43. where he says "Sprague
thought that Howard was just try-
ing to give a tenderfoot a few thrills
." I did not actually Odnk
that in the sense of believing it or
being convinced of it. I merely
deemed it a speculative possibility,
having heard stories of Texans'
fondness for such japes. In par-
ticular, Fletcher Pratt told a tale of
an Englishman who said to his Texan
hosts: "What's this strange custom

I hear of, called 'lynching'?" The
chief host said: "Aw sure, we hang

niggers all the time. Fetch me a
nigger and we'll show you." A
black man was presently produced
and hanged, much impressing the
visitor. Actually the man had ex-

traordinarily powerful neck muscles
and let himself be hanged for money
as a stunt from time to time. As to
how true the tale is, I can only say
that I heard it from Fletcher, who
had heard it from I don't know
whom .

On page 35, I loved Mr. Timm's
picture of the Three Musketeers of
WT. I wish I owned the original.

About E. Hoffmann Price's com-
ments on Da rk Valley Destiny , I
should like to add notes to tidy up
loose ends, using the facts that
have transpired since we wrote the
book. On page 204, we tell of the
poetic pen pal of REH, who stopped
at Cross Plains in t fie early 1930s
to visit Howard. We said: "The

man's identity is not known for cer-
tain, but he was probably Benjamin
Francis Musser (1889-1951 ), poet
and prominent Catholic layman, with
whom Howard is known to have
corresponded . "

My colleague ■ Glenn Lord dis-
covered that the visitor was indeed
Musser, who was on a poetry-read-
ing tour of the US. The fat, jolly
patroness of Texan literature, Lexie
Dean Robertson of Rising Star, had
persuaded Musser to read poetry to
her group. He took advantage of
this stay to look up his Cross Plains
pen pal. But they did not get on
well, and the pal penmanship ab-
ruptly ended. I tried to find any
of Musser's descendants who could
tell Musser's side of the story but
without success. We can but guess
that REH went into one of his surly
moods .

The other loose end is on page
337, when REH and Novalyne Price
had their last serious date. (It was
not altogether their last, as we
said; but subsequent meetings were
more formal, with impersonal talk.)
Novalyne Price Ellis published a de-
tailed account of that date in her
excellent memoir of Robert Howard,
One Who Walked Alone (Grant ,
1986). This sheds light on the af-
fair that makes it look a bit differ-
ent from the guess that the de

Camps, lacking firsthand informa-
tion, put forward.

Novalyne was fearful that Robert

Hallowmas 1 989 / 63

would plunge into heavy love talk.
A year earlier she would have wel-
comed such an initiative; but since
then she had concluded, reluctantly
but logically, that Robert would
make, as she said, "an impossible
husband!" If he spoke of love,
she would have to turn him down
flat. (This was long before the
sexual revolution, so casual sex
probably never even occurred to
them.) Dreading the prospect, she
could think of evading it only by
keeping the talk on a joking, ban
tering level.

Robert was in a highly emotional
state, not so much with love of
Novalyne but rather with horror at
his mother's impending death. He
burst out: "I want to live! I want

a woman to love, a woman to share
my life and believe in me, to want
me and love me. ... I want to
live and to love" (p. 267). To us
it sounds as if he were desperately
trying to find someone to talk him
out of the resolve he had held
from childhood on, not to outlive
his mother.

So the twain were on a basis of
complete misunderstanding. Nova
lyne's only replies to Robert's cries
for help were to kid him about his
walrus mustache. Since Robert had
never confided to her his suicidal
resolve, Novalyne had no idea that
she was being asked to pull a man
back from the brink and was horri-
fied when she subsequently learned
of his suicide. Whether anything
she could have said would have
made a difference in the long run
is, of course, impossible to say.
His fixation was a strong one.

— L. Sprague de Camp, Plano, TX

A minor point of information:
The article on Ed Price states that
he was born near San Jose, Cali-
fornia. Actually, he hailed from
the central part of the state. As
he put it in his first letter to me,
"A letter from Fresno always brings
a nostalgic glow. I was born in
Fowler, hundreds of years ago."

At some later point, he did time
'n San Jose— prior to his stint in
the Philippines, he was an usher at

a downtown theater here.

— Dennis Rickard, San Jose, CA

Crypt #66 is a good, well-rounded
issue. I can remember buying a
copy of The Dunwich Horroi — it was
one of the first Lovecraft books I
ever bought— and wondering why
Innsmouth and "The Shadow out of
Time" were set in a typeface differ-
ent from the rest of the book.
David Schultz illuminates the whole
history of HPL's Best Supernatural
S tories and the Arkham House The
Dunwich Horror in fascinating de-
tail. I found perhaps most fasci-
nating the correspondence which
Dcrleth had with Wandrei and Bloch
concerning the contents of the vol-
ume. Before The Outs ider and
Others emerged, Derleth and Barlow
had correspondence on this subject
— concerning the contents of the
first AH omnibus of HPL's work —
and if I recall correctly Barlow
mentioned some lists of possible
tables of contents which Lovecraft
himself had left. But I am foggy
on this.

In assessing the impact of the
works of Edgar Rice Burroughs on
HPL's writing. Bill Fulwiler begins
to mine a very rich vein— the im
pact of early twentieth-century
popular literature on Lovecraft's
work. Lovecraft mentions a few
favorite stories from the pulps, but
I have little doubt that a rereading
of the files of the magazines he is
known to have read would uncover
other probable influences. I never
read Burroughs beyond the original
Tarzan novel, but Fulwiler makes
me want to do so.

Burleson contributes two worthy
offerings to #66. His essay on
"Lovecraft and the Death of Trag-
edy" certainly makes clear that the
modern cosmic viewpoint spells the
death of human-centered tragedy as
written by the ancient Greeks.
Modelling the complexities of human
language is one of the crucial tasks
remaining for the information sci-
ences. I wonder whether linguis-
tics and modern literary criticism,
between the two of them, will even-
tually enjoy the aid of a "calculus"

64 / Crypt of Cthulhu

of human language. I, for one, am
fascinated by the question of how
closely machines will be able to
think and communicate like human
beings in the future. I wonder,
for instance, whether the microchip
holds the potential of correcting
degenerating thought processes in
human beings— of stopping Alz-
heimer's disease and other forms of
dementia, moderating serious mental
illness, etc. Lovecraft, however,
adequately foresaw that there is a
risk of the displacement of what is
human in us in such processes.

Dorfman furnishes an interesting
note regarding the sources of
Charles Dexter Ward. We know that
Lovecrafl owned art early edition of
Mather's M agn olia, which he be-
queathed to his good friend James
F. Morton, Jr. (Even at 1937 prices
one wonders whether this bequest
constituted the greater part of
l.ovecraft's estate, which was proved
at under $500.) "The Door" by
Michael Storm (a pseudonym?) and
Paul Rerglund on Leiber's Mythos
story both also furnish fascinating
sidelights. I wish, however, that
the specific place of publication of
"The Door" was given.

Miroslaw Lipinski has translated
more powerful works by Crabinski
than the early tale published in
Crypt #66, but even this early sto-
ry shows Crabinski's genius as a
writer of supernatural stories. For
some reason, I have always been
attracted to stories which disguise,
to a limited extent, the persons
and places involved in the action of
the story. Perhaps this device
suggests to me authorial intent to
be compact and to tell only what is
necessary, whereas my own worst
fault in writing is to try to explain
everything .

The interview with the late E.
Hoffmann Price was a valuable re
print. I doubt whether Lovecraft
could ever have been as commercial-
ly successful as Price. By way of
contrast, I think Robert E. Howard
showed he could write for many
different commercial markets. Had
he survived to 65, I think Love
craft would have written and pub

lished a major speculative novel in
the period 1945-1955. By way of
contrast, I would expect Robert F.
Howard would have become a major
regional writer.

A major documentary on Love-
craft filmed by Alain Resnais would
have been a memorable event in-
deed. Much of Providence today
would still be much as Lovecraft
would have remembered, but people
who can remember him in a mean-
ingful way are fast disappearing.
Imagine what a documentary filmed
in 1938 or 1939 might have cap
tured: Annie Gamwell, Maurice

Mue. James Morton, other friends
and acquaintances by the score,
and Lovecraft's final study at 66
College Street. In correspondence
following the death of HPL, his
friend Clark Ashton Smith expressed
the hope that this study might be
preserved as a museum, and al-
though the idea was and is imprac
tical, I begin more and more to
appreciate its merits. What a treas
ure we would have today if this
marvellous room were preserved in-
tact within the John Hay Library,
where, before the List Art Building
was built, it might have enjoyed
very much the same view which it
enjoyed at 66 College Street. But
if we are honest we have to ac-
knowledge that lovecraft is an
author very rich in artifacts. I
think this is part of what makes his
work so eminently collectible.

Well, your magazine continues to
be an outstanding contribution to
the field. While others may mourn
the passing of some of the other
Cryptic Press titles, I do not, if it
means that Crypt of Cthu lhu enjoys
a better chance of survival. I am
not sure whether you have yet
marked your 10th anniversary or
not (although I suspect you have);
in any case, what I mean to say is
that I don't think a retrospective
article on your past pages would be
a form of editorial self-indulgence
at all. — Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.

Clenview, IL

Dorfman's article "Essential Salts"
in Crypt #66 is correct in identify-

Hallowmas 1989 / 65

j n g Cotton Mather as Lovecraft's
source for the "Borellus" quote in
The Case of Cha rles Dexter Ward .
However, it's a little late. Barton
Levi St. Armand pointed this out
long ago in his article "The Source
for Lovecraft's Knowledge of Borel-
lus in The Case of Cha rle s Dexter
War d" ( Nyctalops #13, May 1977).
1 acknowledged St. Armand's find-
ing in my edition of Lovecraft's
Commonplace Book ( 1987), wherein
i noted that Lovecraft cribbed the
epigraph by Lactantius at the be-
ginning of "The Festival" from
Mather as well.

--David E. Schultz
Milwaukee. Wl

Burleson's piece on "I ovecraft
and the Death of Tragedy" I found
especially enjoyable. I can't help
feeling, though, that HPL would
have rejected Joseph Wood Krutch's
final stance toward the cosmos and
humanity's relationship to it. Krutch
seems to have had a fine sense of
what existence was all about but
finally couldn't take it and decided
that allegiance to illusions was bel-
ter than facing reality. I suspect
that HPL would have found a closer
affinity with more recent probers of
human nature such as B. F. Skinner
and E. 0. Wilson. The latter's
"Sociobiology," explaining human
social behavior in Darwinian terms,
would have "rung true" to him, I'm
sure. And Lionel Tiger's study of
optimism (and religion as a subdivi-
sion of that category) as an attitude
conveying a reproductive advantage,
would have won his approval, I'm
sure. Philosophy and literary anal-
yses are fun, but the sciences are
always outrunning them and making
them look silly in retrospect.

— Richard L. Tierney
Mason City, I A

Pass the salt — looks like I've got
to eat a lot of my words.

There's no getting around it — or,
in this case, burrowing beneath it.
E. P. Berglund caught me dissemi-
nating some incorrect information,
in his article "The Bu rrower s Be
neath by Fritz Leiber" ( Crypt 66),

he quotes my review of Brian Lum-
ley's T he Burrow e rs Beneath , in
which I stated, ^Coincidentally, it
(Th e Burrowers Beneath | was also
the same title Fritz Leiber had given
a 3,000 word fragment of a Mythos
story he began writing after Love-
craft's death, but eventually de-
stroyed." Following the fascinating
excerpts of his correspondence with
Leiber, in which he appears to
prove conclusively that (1) the
fragment was actually entitled "The
Lovecraftian Story," (2) the frag-
ment was begun before Lovecraft's
death, (3) the fragment was 9,000
to 5,000 words long, and (9) Leiber
did not destroy the fragment but
actually used it as the basis for
the novella "The Terror from the
Depths." Mr. Berglund states with
consideration, "In conclusion, I do
want to say that I am in no way ac-
cusing Stefan Dziemianowicz of
faulty research, only that I don't
know what his source was. The
faults may not even be his, but his
original source's."

Well, yes and no.

My source was Fritz Leiber's own
review of Brian Lumley's novel in
the June 1975 (Vol. 29, No. 9) is-
sue of Fantastic . (Okay, the truth
is now known— I don't actually read
the books, I read everyone else's
reviews!) I fear I garbled the in-
formation from the following para-
graphs, which deserve to be quoted
in their entirety:

I can personally testify to
the siren power of the tempta-
tion to get into the Mythos
game. I corresponded volumi
nously with Lovecraft during his
last eight months and it had two
profound effects on me: I was

permanently inculcated with his
scientific skepticism toward all
branches of tin occult, and I
became convin. , that the su-
pernatural horror story and the
fantasy (and sword-and-sorcery )
story are as much art as any
other sort of fiction and de-
mand a writer's best efforts—
self- and world-searching, hon
esty, scholarship and carefulest
(continued on page 9)

NEXT TIME

Crypt of Cthulhu #69 is our third Lin Carter issue featur
ing more strange treasures from Lin's files of unpublished manu
scripts. Among the goodies are these:

"Terror Wears Yellow"

"A Bottle of Djinn"

"Sweet Tooth"

"The Bell in the Tower" (a completion of Lovecraft's
fragment "The Descendant")

"The Strange Doom of Enos Harker"

"Nameless Cods and Entities: Robert E. Howard's
Contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos"

"Baleful Myths and Liturgies: Clark Ashton Smith's
Contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos"

"The Great Old Ones," an updated version of his
glossary "H. P. Lovecraft: The Gods"

By Corm, you won't want to miss it!

CRYPT OF CTHULHU

Editor

Robert M. Price

Contributing Editors
S. T. Joshi . Will Murray
Mike Ashley

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

Copyright O 19B9

"The Prodigy of Dreams," "Allan and Adelaide —
An Arabesque," "Ghost Stories for the Dead,"
".Studies in Horror," "Order of Illusion,"
"Charnelhouse of the Moon," "Ten Steps to Thin
Mountain," "Selections of Lovecraft," "The
Consolations of Horror," by Thomas Ligotti

Cover and inside art by S. Thomas Brown

Other material by
Cryptic Publications
Robert M. Price, Editor
216 Fernwood Avenue
Upper Montclair, New Jersey 07043